


What's Keeping the Stars Apart

by Inmyownidiom



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Banter, Ben Flies The Falcon, F/M, Happy Ending, Oral Sex, SO MUCH BANTER, This probably isn't how the Force works, awkward space virgins, but honestly I don't care, fix it epilogue, force ghost cunnilingus, full of sass and snark, if they can retcon basically everything, let rey grieve, let them Fuck, let there be closure, poe dameron is pan-species-sexual and i will die on this hill, so much shade we're basically in a cave, then so can I, very brief zorii/poe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-07
Updated: 2020-02-07
Packaged: 2021-02-28 01:40:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 21,248
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22605625
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Inmyownidiom/pseuds/Inmyownidiom
Summary: The twin suns hover just above the horizon, about a palm’s width apart. Rey wonders how it might feel to be like that: to have a partner for eternity, to never be alone. Although...no—one of the suns is smaller and redder. Older, perhaps. It will fade first. In a million years, the sky will be just a little bit less bright, and a little bit emptier.But for now, they will sink into the sand together.(A post-TROS fix-it epilogue.)
Relationships: Rey/Ben Solo, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 56
Kudos: 180





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> A thousand thanks to [HarpiaHarpyja](https://archiveofourown.org/users/HarpiaHarpyja/pseuds/HarpiaHarpyja) and [Sciosophia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sciosophia/pseuds/sciosophia) for their beta help and suggestions. The womp rat scene is all Sciosophia's idea, so thanks, lady. 
> 
> <3 to you both.

He comes to her in her dreams.

He  _ comes _ , too, and that’s the part Rey can’t stop thinking about. 

-

It doesn’t go that way in the beginning, of course. 

The first night in Luke’s old home, she doesn’t sleep. The single undamaged pallet she finds is stiff with age and caked with sand. She’s slept on worse surfaces, but the discomfort doesn’t exactly calm her mind; her thoughts leap about like one of the sand jumpers she saw in the late afternoon.

BB-8 hates being here. It reminds him too much of Jakku, and he made certain to tell her at least four times in the first hour of landing. She hadn’t wanted to bring him—even if he was filled with fewer questions than everyone else, he still had questions—but Poe had begged. She shouldn’t be alone, he’d said. And Rey could see how the gesture had pained her friend, so she’d accepted, if only to give him a bit of relief. 

No one is sure what the future will bring. The First Order, while crippled, is still present in the galaxy, and without any leadership for either the dark or the light, a power vacuum will be inevitable. The former Resistance determined their new goal to be to create a sort of senate, or at the very least the beginnings of a new system of government. 

It all sounds miserable. Rey is no better at speaking publicly or debating than she is at swimming. If she were to be involved, it would be as something akin to a mascot. 

_ We have the Last Jedi, _ the burgeoning leaders would say.  _ Ally yourselves with us and you shall become an ally to her,  _ and they would drag her around the galaxy like a prize hog. 

Here, though, by herself (at least as much as she can be with a whistling droid complaining about dust in his gears), she can focus. She can find… Oh, she isn’t certain. Perhaps she’s looking to find  _ herself. _ She’s spent so long searching for a sense of belonging in the universe, and now that she finally knows where it is, she despises where it’s left her: loathing the parents who sold her to a beast in order to ‘protect her’ from another beast, adrift once more in the meaningless stream of destiny.

Rey flops to her other side on the cot. Another few hours remain until the first of the moons rises, and there isn’t much light in the room. Not any light at all, actually. The darkness enfolds her, and her mind goes straight to the moments on the Sith planet, moments where she lingered in the claustrophobic blackness of death. She always expected there to be light at the end, or loved ones, or even a flock of giggling cherubs, but it had been as stifling as being thrust into a void. No light, no sound, no sensation. 

Skin crawling, she tosses the blankets off and goes to the little solar powered lantern on the desk by the door. Warm light stutters out of the filament. There’s a loose wire inside, and it turns off after a second. Rey smacks it a few times until it holds as steadily as it’s able. She returns to the bed, the flicker sending those dark memories to the corners of the room where they lurk with the struggling shadows.

Dust rises into her nose from the blanket she pulls over her shoulders, and she sneezes. One question in particular bites at her: earlier today, why had she called herself ‘Rey Skywalker?’ It seemed natural in the moment, but as she thinks on it, the whole concept prickles at her. Taking on a name doesn’t take on a family. It doesn’t give you companionship, or love. No name could do that. What else would she have used, though? 

‘Palpatine?’ The very thought makes her stomach churn. She doubts she’ll ever be able to think of her bloodline with anything but revulsion. 

‘Solo,’ then?

Her chest constricts painfully at that, like something beneath her sternum is curling in on itself.

_ Ben. _

_ Ben. _

_ Ben.  _

She’ll just be ‘Rey,’ then.

She rolls to her side and stares at the wall lit by the flickering lantern, at the cracks that spiderweb across the dried mud, and waits to close her eyes until the unshed tears dry up.

-

The home she’s claimed for her own is so dry that she has to smear a fatty salve on her fingertips to keep them from cracking. The moisture farming equipment hasn’t been serviced in decades, and she’ll need to find parts from a nearby town. Deciding to settle here suddenly seems like an idiotic, dramatic decision. She should have gone somewhere with water. Trees. Rain. Ice, even. 

After traveling on a speeder (which also needed fixing), bartering for parts, then repairing the vaporators enough so instead of spewing dust they spew mouldering sludge, she collapses onto the pallet that night without removing her boots. BB-8 whistles something from outside the doorway, and it sounds like consolation, but Rey is too tired to listen.

That’s when she dreams of him. 

She’s barely slipped into unconsciousness when she sees him lunging for her, one hand splayed and reaching out. 

Rey wakes up screaming. Sweat beads on her skin, and her heart races as if she’s sprinted for parsecs. The image of him is seared into her memory: black clothing, thick hair flying around his face, a wild expression widening his dark eyes. 

Ben. 

But...maybe it had been Kylo Ren. She’d known the latter for over a year and the former for not even an hour. How can she be expected to differentiate between the two?

That ache blooms in her chest beneath her sternum again, and she digs her fingers into her skin through the thin wraps. 

_ Gods, _ she should have been able to tell. Kylo Ren was her enemy and a murderer. Ben saved her. Ben fought beside her, trusted in her, dragged his broken body to her side and gave her all that remained of his life. And here she is, living that life out as a hermit and believing dreams of him are nightmares. 

Guilt is a bitter tonic; it stings her throat as she forces it down. 

She realizes then it doesn’t much matter if the dream had been of Ben or Kylo Ren. They are both gone. 

Rey rarely cries. After years of Plutt beating her whenever she made the slightest sniffle, tears have never come easily. But as she thinks about Ben, how she’ll never again touch his face, taste his smile, feel the warmth of his arms holding her body tightly against his, she lets the tears go. Her sobs shake the bed, and the sand turns to mud against her cheek.

She doesn’t sleep again that night.

-

The suns are up long after she is. In Tosche Station, she avoids most of the strange glances and successfully trades a few spare parts from the  _ Falcon  _ for some missing wiring sets needed in the vaporators. It takes hours for liquid to emerge from the spigot and even if it tastes like something she’d expect out of an unwashed helmet, she drinks until her stomach cramps.

BB-8 has chosen to spend most of his days on the  _ Falcon _ . There’s better conversation to be had on it than with her, it seems. 

Rey staggers into the room she’s chosen for her own. Unlike the night before, she has enough energy to remove her boots and strip down to her undergarments before she collapses onto the pallet, a thin cloud of dust rising with the force of her impact. Sleep overtakes any straggling thoughts.

When he comes to her this time, she knows with certainty this is  _ Ben. _ He doesn’t lunge, only stands before her, though there’s an impatient intensity to the way he holds himself.

He’s wearing the same clothes as when he died. Rey’s attention catches on the singed saber hole over his ribcage and the roughened patches from where the fabric snagged on sharp stone. The wounds on his hands are gone though, as are the ones on his cheek. His hair looks soft and the dark circles that once signaled so much time spent without hope or peace are no longer beneath his eyes.

He reaches out slowly, fingers trembling, like he’s afraid she’ll fly away. The look on his face is one of wonder and amazement. His gaze sticks to a spot high on her chest, right where the ache has been centered, and lays his palm on top of it. Rey can feel the warmth of his skin through the thin fabric covering her torso. Something seems to shudder through him and as his gaze meets hers, he gives her the sort of smile that implies he’s startled to be happy. It’s the same kind of smile he gave her before. Before he…

If Rey is to only have him in dreams now, she wants more. She curls her fingers into his shirt and tugs him down to her mouth.

This is a rougher kiss than their first. It’s no longer important to be tender or kind. His chest lifts in a gasp as her teeth scrape his lower lip, and the harsh slide of their mouths rasps his stubble over her chin. Strong arms enclose her, solid and tight enough to almost believe it is real.

Rey comes out of this dream and curses the sunlight that woke her too soon.

-

A little more tinkering on the vaporators manages to filter out most of the terrible taste. The suns are high, and Rey’s stomach growls. BB-8 is somewhere—he’s still irritated with her, since she’s been responding to his worried questions with silence. What would she even say? For all his personality, he is still mechanical. He can’t understand what’s happening within her, especially since Rey herself isn’t able to put words to it. 

Apparently his communication with the  _ Falcon  _ continues to be more productive. As he rolled away this last time, she’d heard the droid equivalent of a mumbled curse. Rey wasn’t too put out; her feelings can’t be hurt by an insult to her ‘circuits.’ 

He won’t miss her if she’ll go out foraging, but she knocks on the  _ Falcon _ ’s closed door and lets him know anyway. 

Rey finds her food in a garbage heap. 

A fair distance from the hut, she stumbles upon a mound of trash several meters across. It’s recent—a load accidentally dropped by a transport, she’d guess—and the stench makes her eyes water. A portion of the pile shifts at her approach.

Rey pulls out her saber and ignites it as a long, whiskered nose pokes out from underneath a half-eaten gourd. She relaxes. What had she expected to be lurking in garbage? A Sith lord? 

Trash explodes, and suddenly a creature half as long as Rey is racing down the pile toward her. The dainty nose was deceiving: this creature has fangs as long as her forearm and a scaled tail that lashes in excitement. Or hunger, more likely, considering the drool flying from its mouth. 

She could swing once and slice it in half. 

Though…

Not leaving herself time to condemn the thought, Rey flings out one arm and forces power through her fingertips. Blue lightning flashes, hitting the creature. It shrieks once then falls still. The smell of burning fur hits Rey’s nose and sets her coughing. The corpse is charred. Flakes of skin drift to the sand when she nudges it with the tip of her boot. Too much, then.

There’s more movement in the pile. 

The second womp rat receives less of a jolt. It smells better, at least. 

Perhaps she shouldn’t be doing this, Rey thinks as she slices off a bit of haunch to taste. This is bad power. Evil power. Yet for all its abhorrent qualities, she doesn’t feel any different than when she had lifted rocks. She’s manipulating the world around her and within her; why can’t she claim this as  _ her _ power? It isn’t like there’s anyone around to judge her for using it. The ache in her chest pulses, which she ignores. 

The meat tastes decent, if a bit gamey. She fashions a sledge and brings the roasted carcass back with her. 

-

They go farther in this dream. 

Just as he’d done the night before, Ben rests his hand on her sternum. The tips of his fingers graze the hollow of her throat, and he’s warm, and tangible, and when her breath catches, his lips tip into the small sort of smile that hints at shared jokes and secret thoughts.

And just as the night before, Rey wants more. 

She sets her hand atop his and guides it lower until his palm slips beneath her gauzy undershirt and across the swell of her breast. He stares a moment, blinking at the sight, before his mouth crashes into hers and his fingers find her stiffening nipple. 

There’s a split second where Rey wonders why he would hesitate in her dream, which is, after all,  _ her  _ fantasy, yet his touch is clever and quick, and the thought scatters. She arches against him. Her hands twist in his rough tunic, and she lets out a soft moan as his mouth trails along her jaw and down her neck. His breath is hot on her skin, and his wet kisses follow the path his hand has just taken.

Excitement leaps within her. How will it feel to have his tongue there? Will he pull her nipple between his lips, lightly scrape his teeth over it, groan against the rapid thrum of her heartbeat? 

Rey wakes before she can discover, with the light from the suns bright on her eyelids. 

Her body feels tight and scorched all over, unsated and frustrated. 

Today, she will cover that damned window. 

-

Sand is everywhere. It’s gotten absolutely everywhere. In the time between the farm’s last owners and Rey’s tenancy, dunes have blown into most of the rooms and left no surface uncovered. The room in which she’s been sleeping must have been away from the wind, so at least there’s less work to do in that one area. She starts there. 

The sand grains respond well to the Force; Rey focuses only a moment before great piles of it rise into the air and slide through the open window. Out it goes, grain by grain.

_ Lifting rocks, _ she thinks with an amused snort. If Master Luke could see her now. 

She bites her cheek and lowers her outstretched hand. The remaining grains drift to the floor, shining as they fall. And what would Luke say? 

_ ‘You think you’re powerful because you can lift things? Sand, rocks—it’s all the same. There’s more to the Force than that. There’s always more.’  _

Rey frowns at how easy it is to hear the words in his sardonic growl. He’d say that, undoubtedly, along with _ ‘Don’t use the lightning,’  _ and  _ ‘Control your dreams.’  _

She doesn’t actually hear him, though. All of the voices of her forebears have been silent, primarily due to her not opening herself to them. It’s loud enough in her head already.

The rest of the sand scatters with a look. 

A barely-moistened cloth works well to scrub away crusted clumps on the desk and at the head of the pallet. She heaves the pallet pad outside and beats it with a rod until no more dust flies from it. 

_ You seem like you’re looking for something to fight. _

Rey doesn’t turn at the beeps and whistles. She gives the pad an extra swat. 

“I’ve already fought something,” she says. “I’ll be eating it for the next week.” 

_ Will you ever tell me what— _

“How’s Poe?” 

Out of the corner of her eye, she sees BB-8’s antennas twitch at her interruption.  _ He’s fine. He and Finn have found more allies. Lando thinks Poe wants to be the official voice of the new representative, but Lando has expressed his own interest in the post, and Rose can’t bear to be in the same room with them for more than… _

Rey stops listening. It’s the sort of update she hates; nothing more than what would be told to a stranger. She longs to contact Poe, Rose, or Finn herself, but can’t bear to see the worry in their eyes when they ask how she’s doing on this backwater planet, so like the backwater planet she thought she’d forever left behind. 

She begins to bring the pad inside, and BB-8 lets out a melancholy whistle. 

_ Gods, _ she’d been so distracted she’d forgotten he was still talking. And she simply walked away from him as if he wasn’t there. 

Rey turns to him. “BB-8, I’m sorry, I didn’t—” 

_ You could tell me why you don’t want me here. That might help. _

“I  _ do _ want you here.” 

_ Why? _

“Because…” But she can’t finish, since she doesn’t have a real answer. 

He dips his head and rolls back into the  _ Falcon _ . 

Rey curses, gives the pad a fierce kick that startles out a last, sneaky puff of dust, and returns inside. 

Her room looks decent. She has clean surfaces to sit, eat, and sleep on, and her feet don’t leave scuffs on a sand-covered floor. 

One room finished. Rey glances through the doorway and sighs. Just everything else to go. 

-

That night, Ben travels low, covering one breast with his hand and the other with his mouth. She longs to ask if he’s done any of this before; something in the way he constantly glances up to check her reactions tells her that he’s as inexperienced as she. A kiss here or there, stolen pecks in youth. Never this. But oh, he learns quick. 

In her dream, that is. 

He learns quick in her dream.

She can’t ever forget. No matter how warm his mouth, or how she can feel the hairs on the back of his forearm as she grips it, this is a dream. He is not here. He is gone. 

Rey twines her fingers in his soft, thick hair and presses him closer. She will take whatever she can. 

-

The homestead is starting to look lived in. All of the dunes are gone, the vaporators are functioning, and there’s most of a womp rat preserving in a bin of salt. Rey still uses the  _ Falcon _ ’s ‘fresher, since it appears that Luke and his former family bathed using a sand shower. An entire year of relaxing in hot water has spoiled Rey for cleaning off in any other way; water and soap have become her new necessities. 

Needing a break from cleaning, she takes her saber to a nearby bluff and practices with it. It ignites with a great burst and she feels the low buzz of the kyber crystal all the way through to her heels. The hilt is heavier than the others she’s used. It had taken some time to become used to it, with its different balance point, yet she’s never before felt something that has seemed so  _ right _ in her hands. This is not another’s weapon, not an extension of another’s body; she created it for her own grip and from her own mind. She hopes Ben would be proud of what she’d accomplished in making it. 

The blade beams merrily in the afternoon, a golden reflection of the suns’ light. 

As she twirls it in a tight circle, she abruptly realizes that Ben has never spoken to her in the dreams. 

She misses his voice: the catch in it when emotion clutched at him, and the tightness in his words, and the fire of his confidence. How ludicrous that she only heard that voice from Kylo. Ben would have so much to say, and it was he who was silenced. The universe is horribly unfair.

The saber buzzes like a scream as she slices it through the air and Rey clenches her jaw so she does not scream herself. She’s supposed to be training in the way she had read about, using smooth, calculated motions, feeling the tip of the saber as if it is the end of her fingers.

She thinks of possibilities quashed and futures ruined, and the saber screams again. 

At last, when the suns are low and the twilight air chills the sweat on her skin, she deluminates the weapon and clips it to her belt. Her anger is a thin remnant of earlier; she feels as if she’s sweated out most of it. 

The twin suns hover just above the horizon, about a palm’s width apart. Rey wonders how it might feel to be like that: to have a partner for eternity, to never be alone. Although...no—one of the suns is smaller and redder. Older, perhaps. It will fade first. In a million years, the sky will be just a little bit less bright, and a little bit emptier. 

But for now, they will sink into the sand together. 

Rey makes her way back to the homestead and thinks of the night. 

So far, Ben has only touched her. His hands and his mouth have made her moan and shiver and ache. It’s not enough—she wants these things from him. Each time she has been so overwhelmed by the joy in contact that she hasn’t even thought to explore  _ him.  _ If these dreams are all she will get—the palty collections of her own imagination and memory—she will make more of an effort when she sleeps tonight. Maybe then, he’ll speak. 

-

It’s instant, this time. Rey closes her eyes and lets her mind drift, and then he’s there at once, already touching her. His lips are heated on her neck, his fingers brush against the bare skin of her back. She isn’t sure why she’s naked. She isn’t sure why he is as well. He shivers as she lightly scrapes the backs of her nails up his sides, and she feels his warm breath stir the fine hairs by her ear. 

She’d seen the long scar on his chest disappear as she healed him on the watery ruins. As she lets her gaze rove over him, she notices the circular weal on his shoulder is gone as well, though he still has remnants of old wounds scattered about his arms, his stomach, and one small divot along the top of his clavicle. Was she only able to erase what she herself had given? 

Ben doesn’t seem to share her need for musings. He’s moving low, headed once more to her breasts.

_ More, _ something clamors within her.  _ More. _

Rey nudges him away just enough so she can drag her tongue from his pectoral to the sharp angle of his jaw. Goosebumps rise beneath her touch. Though the scar is gone, she’ll always remember the path it once took. She’s on her toes in order to reach him, and as her tongue flicks his jaw, he lets out a gasp. 

She reaches between them to his cock, and Ben gasps again as she closes her fingers around it. He grips her shoulder, her upper arm, wanting to hold tight, not wanting to bruise.

Rey glances down and pauses. This is  _ her _ dream. She’s never seen him like this. How would she know about the scar on his hip? Or the mole at the top of his thigh? Or how the length of him looks in her palm? She still doesn’t know much about sex—she’s always been discomfited by the transactional nature of pornographic holos—but she has a decent enough knowledge of the appendages involved. Perhaps she’s supplemented gaps in her knowledge with images from those holos; what’s in her hand certainly seems like the right size for such an assumption.

He cups her cheek and angles her face for a kiss. 

“Tell me what to do,” she whispers against his lips, tightening her grip slightly.

Ben guides her hand along his cock. “Like this,” he says, voice low and unsteady and just as beautiful as she remembers. “Just like this.”

-

Rey’s first reaction when she wakes is to wipe the cum from her hands. It isn’t there, of course. 

She’s never been so disappointed to be clean. 

-

It’s late in the afternoon when Rey settles on a stone by the homestead and tries to meditate. Her stomach is filled with fresh womp rat—the first one she’d killed had begun to turn to jerky, and she figures she should begin to at least create some sort of food store—and a handful of scrounged roots from weeds that had grown lush in a sheltered canyon nearby. Though it’s not the most varied diet, it provides her energy. She’s only been here a few days and she already finds herself longing for the sharp tang of fresh leaves or the sweet juice of something plucked ripe from a tree. 

In her cleaning rampage, she discovered a crumbling book in the kitchen, covered in piles of sand, and upon opening it found it to be a collection of recipes hand-written in a small, perfect script. Her mouth had watered at the instructions for corn loaves and cold soups, creamy cheeses and baked vegetables. Several entries included ‘bantha milk’ as an ingredient.  _ That _ shouldn’t be too hard to find, right? If Luke could milk a thala-siren and force himself to drink what emerged…

She’ll think on all that later. 

Rey breathes slowly. She closes her eyes and forces her other senses to bloom. There’s the smell of the sand, warm and dry; the feather-light touch of the suns as heat on her exposed skin; the low moaning drone of a distant wind. She feels that wind as it races along the sand, kicks at the tops of dunes. Grains scatter in the light and she feels them too as the barest brush along her forearms, like the tender caress of a fingertip. Like someone is slowly tracing her contours.

Like…

She’s lucky she only rose a foot or so off the ground during this meditation—the abrupt jerk of her thoughts tears her from her peace and she falls onto the rock with a thump and a yelp. Her heart thrums in her chest. 

Rey straightens and attempts to dust off her clothes. The white helps with the heat and the sun, but the yellow-orange sand is starting to leave stains. She takes a swig from her canteen and looks out at the horizon. 

Thinking of the previous night feels delicious, as if every time she dips into memory, she’s taking another bite of cake. She’d expected him to be proud and stoic, just as he’d been in his cowl and his mask. But he had trembled under her ministrations in such a way that she found herself remembering the fairy tales and romantic stories of her youth, where virginal princesses trembled at the long-denied touch of their rescuers. It’s both charming and amusing, the idea of him as a prince trapped in a tower. Is she to rescue him? Is this a meaning dragged from some prophetic place, or is it just another case of her fantasies encroaching upon what was only fantasy already? 

It’s a fool’s task to try and find order in a dream. Rey folds her legs and closes her eyes once more. The calm comes easier now, as if her wild thoughts needed a little nourishment before they could wander away. 

She feels the sand, and the wind, and the dry air that surrounds her like a cocoon. It’s time to reach out, even if she doesn’t want to do so.

_ Be with me. _

One voice, then another. They whisper so softly at first that she has to strain to detect them above the wind’s rasp against the landscape. She listens more, focuses harder, and they gain vigor. Voices murmur to her about strength and balanced power, light as the great provider, how she must be whole to be complete. The snippets that manage to make sense aren’t anything she wants to hear. 

She listens to men, women, and beings of indeterminate gender until the voices blend together. 

Ben had dissolved into the Force ad become one with it, just as the Jedi had done. So why can’t she hear him? Why isn’t he telling her the supposed secrets of the universe along with his ancestors and forebears? 

Leia’s voice cuts into Rey’s irritation.  _ Why here? _

“Why not here?” Rey responds. She isn’t sure if Leia is referring to the planet, or the rock above which Rey is floating. 

If ghost voices could shrug, Leia would be doing just that.  _ I hated it on this planet. Though you have more comfortable clothing than I did when I was here, which would make a difference.  _

“I was told to return to the beginning,” Rey says, miffed. “Isn’t this—”

_ Who the hell told you  _ that?

Rey frowns.  _ Someone _ told her that, though now, she can’t remember who. It had seemed to make sense. Up until this moment, at least. She sighs. “I want to find…” Gods, now that doesn’t make sense either. What has she been looking for? Herself? Any sense of place belonging? Whatever produces Bantha milk?  _ Ben? _

“I want to find what’s missing,” Rey says lamely.

She can feel Leia’s smile.  _ All you need is inside you. _

“What? What does that mean? Need for what?” 

There’s no response, and Rey lets out a very un-Jedi-like grumble. Death hasn’t changed Leia; she’s as sage and vague as ever. 

Before she finishes her meditation, more voices nag her about destiny and life and nonsense she can’t bother to absorb, and Luke bursts in to snap sardonically that he’s glad it’s only his father’s saber stuck on Tatooine for eternity and not his own.

Rey stomps back to the homestead with the echoes of a hundred voices in her ears and only echoing silence from the one she longs to hear.

-

He speaks to her more that night. 

“I miss you.” He breathes it along her skin, saying it to the inside of her elbow, and the curve of her shoulder, and the dips between her ribs. His fingers brush over places that make her shudder and wriggle against him, skim over parts of her that become hot and slippery. 

“I’d wanted this,” he whispers. “I’d wanted you. I wish—” 

Whatever he meant to say trails off as the tip of one of his thick fingers presses into her and the rest of his words die, choked, in his throat. His hands go on, making up for the failure of his voice. 

It feels nice. But just... _ nice. _ Not mind-blowing. Not heart-stopping. This is all from her imagination, after all.

Rey has only ever had her own fingers inside. It feels good, though the angle has never been right and anything longer than a few moments quickly becomes uncomfortable as her wrists ache and her tendons seize. There wouldn’t be much of a difference between her own hands and Ben’s, right? It’s obvious that in this foggy dreamspace (however real it might seem), her mind is filling in sensations with what it deems to be accurate. She feels the same fullness and warmth she’s encountered in her masturbatory explorations, but not much more than that. 

She grips his hips, angles him in the way she feels best, and guides his cock into her. In the bizarre landscape of her dream, this liminal space has no furniture or walls. Rey isn’t positive the act they’re currently engaged in is physically possible standing in this way. Not that it matters. The sensation of fullness shifts within her, and she feels something both heavy and tight begin to climb up through her torso. There should be more, though. She’s felt Ben’s skin and his breath and the weight of his cock; how can she not have more than that? Isn’t sex supposed to be painful the first time? Shouldn’t she be wondering how in the worlds he can fit  _ that  _ inside? Or maybe she’s read too many of those stories, watched too many uninformed holos. 

But, again, this isn’t real. All that happens here comes from her mind, and in her fantasies, apparently she doesn’t have to worry about such a droll thing as a hymen. 

So she wraps herself around Ben as he keeps moving. His breath quickens and his fingers dig into her waist, and she focuses on the blurry sensation of things with which she has no experience until there’s a sharp, bright burst of pleasure that leaves her gasping when she wakes. 

The blankets are damp with her sweat. Rey throws them off to let her flushed skin cool. Even after a dream in which she’s come to...completion, there’s still that damned tightness in her chest, beneath her sternum, and as she rests her hand over it, she swears it warms at her touch. 

She returns to sleep like that, as if she’s holding onto something she can’t quite grasp. 

-

For all that happens in the night, Rey finds she wants to speak to someone who doesn’t fade with the dawn. Someone not mechanical. 

A friend.

She is about halfway to the  _ Falcon _ when anxiety begins to gnaw at her fingertips. What will they say? What will they ask? What will  _ she _ say? 

BB-8 gives her an inquisitive beep as she boards. 

_ I think you’ll need to refill the tanks for the ‘fresher soon, if you keep using it so much. _

“Not here for the ‘fresher.” The droid rolls back into whatever corner he’d been inhabiting with a sound that, had it come from a human, would be a weary sigh. 

Rey plops into the cockpit seat before she can convince herself that maybe she shouldn’t do this. She stares at the comm screen for a full minute, then punches in the code to contact Rose. Although she’s imagined this conversation a thousand times, her palms are sweaty and her pulse rattles against her skin. 

_ Rose, _ she’ll say.  _ Tell me what to do. Tell me how to feel. Tell me how I should go on after I’ve found someone and loved them and then lost them and don’t even have a body to bury. _

The holo screen flickers, and Rose’s smiling face beams out. 

“Rey!” 

Rey has to smile back; it’s been too long since she’s seen joy in a face outside her dreams. “How are you? Is all well?”

“It’s...it’s good!” Rose says it in a frantic, adoring sort of way, as if she’s describing a difficult child. As she buttons up her jacket, Rey notices that her outfit is quite formal: gleaming buttons and even a tasseled pauldron, gloves on the desk in front of the holo screen and a cape draped over a chair. “Busy, though,” she continues. “We’ve got diplomacy talks. I’m supposed to outline my plan for the new organizational systems.” Her eyes light up. “I’ve never been busier in my life, but I know that we’re close. This could be peace, Rey,  _ lasting _ peace.” 

Rey settles her feet on the chair and rests her chin on her knees. This happiness should be contagious. It doesn’t seem to catch. 

Rose’s eyes flick to a spot above her own holo monitor, and she starts. “Oh, balls,” she mutters to herself, then says to Rey, “I’m sorry, I gotta go. They’re starting soon.”

“Oh, all right.” It’s hard to disguise her disappointment, though Rey manages an upbeat “Good luck!” anyway. 

Rose pauses, her cape halfway settled on her shoulders, and gives Rey a concerned look through the screen. 

“Are you okay?” she asks. 

_ Gods, _ it’s the single, awful question Rey has been dreading. She’d thought it would cut at her, or slice open wounds she’d thought had begun to heal; in actuality, she never realized how... _ lovely _ it feels to be asked that by someone who truly wants to hear the answer. 

_ Am I okay? _

No. Not at all.

Now isn’t the time for truths; now is the time for supporting a friend, smiling even if she doesn’t feel like doing so.

“Yeah,” Rey says. “It’s nice here.”

A crease forms on Rose’s forehead, having seen right through the lie. She presses her lips together, wrings her gloves in her hands, and takes a quick breath, as if she’s preparing to say something she knows Rey doesn’t want to hear. But then she glances once more at whatever has reminded her of her limited time and lays her palm against the holo screen. 

“We’ll talk,” she says. “Soon. I promise.” 

Rey lifts her palm to the screen so her hand is touching Rose’s pixelated one. She opens her mouth to agree right as the comm cuts out, leaving her hand pressed to darkness. 

It’s not the worst way the conversation could have gone. 

She decides to try again, and punches in the numbers Finn gave her. The screen dallies for a moment and then shows an empty room. Rey frowns. 

“Finn?”

Silence, and even when she shouts his name into the monitor several times, he doesn’t appear. His quarters are sloppy, with discarded clothes scattered about the floor and—is that one of the Jedi texts next to his rubbish bin? Rey slaps the screen to disconnect it. 

It isn’t as if she’d expected them all to be waiting around, leaping to talk to the person who essentially abandoned them for a nearly-deserted desert planet, an irritable droid, and an empty homestead.

Rey can feel the melancholy creeping up. She grits her teeth and shoves it away, if only for a few moments. Long enough to try Poe.

The screen blinks to life and shows a dark room. Rey squints and can barely make out movement among what appears to be quarters almost as messy as Finn’s. Maybe the holo connection triggers a light to come on, and when it does, Rey can only stare as she tries to understand the illuminated scene. 

A woman with dirty blonde hair and high cheekbones is sprawled on Poe’s bed—no, that must be Zorii, Rey can see the helmet now, tossed into a corner. Her mouth hangs open in rapture, and Poe’s curls are caught tight in her fists. His head— 

Oh, goodness, his head is between her legs, which must mean his mouth— 

Rey swallows. 

Zorii is moaning and crying out with pleasure. It must be good, whatever he’s doing. She seems to be enjoying it. Very much. 

They snap up together at Rey’s startled bleat, Poe shouting a panicked ‘Ohnoo!’ as Zorii shrieks and hurls wadded clothing at the screen, but Rey has already punched the disconnect button. 

The images are stuck fast in her mind. Feet still planted on the seat, she wraps her arms around her legs and buries her head in her knees. 

Too much. 

She saw far, far too much. 

Not that this is the first time, unfortunately. Back on the base, she’d forgotten to announce herself once and walked in to see Poe performing a similar act on Finn, and then another time had stepped behind a building and seen Poe and Klaud, though she never wanted to figure out exactly what had been happening  _ there. _

He’d always been more clothed, though. 

Zorii’s moans seem to echo in the  _ Falcon _ ’s cockpit. 

Until now, Rey hasn’t thought of such an act being done to...well...a woman. 

Even though Poe's face was grainy on the screen, she could see how his mouth was shining, his lips reddened from what he'd been doing, how Zorii’s back was arched and how sweat shone on her bare skin. 

Rey unfolds from the seat and strides out of the ship. 

She doesn’t regret making the call, or even what she’s seen; it’s given her an idea for tonight.

-

The dream begins differently than the others. 

Rey feels herself floating, buoyed aloft by currents she can’t see. She isn’t in the empty void of death; there are lights here, colorful ribbons twining in the air above her head, and she can hear a faint roar, like that of some distant river.

The ache in her chest flutters and seizes against her ribs like a desperate, wounded animal. Without thinking how asinine it would be to try and heal that which she can’t touch or see, she presses her palm to her sternum and sends her life force to the spot until it calms. 

Her surroundings shift, and then she’s on the pallet. Ben perches on the edge of the mattress. He’s gazing down at her with some troubled expression. The previous nights have depicted him as he’d been in life: pale skin, dark hair, as tangible as anything unreal can be. 

But the Ben at her side is slightly transparent, the edges of his body tinted with a dim, blue glow. He wears the dark tunic with its same little hole, baggy around his neck and hanging loose on his shoulders. 

It’s more than a little strange to dream of him as a Force ghost; Rey holds out her arms and beckons him into her embrace anyway.

He pauses before he kisses her. His face is harder to read, faded like this, but she would bet his head is filled with a thousand thoughts from a thousand different subjects. Worries, and hopes, and little terrors she longs to be able to understand. When she kisses him and wraps her arms around his neck, she feels him solid and strong. There is no warmth in his skin though, as if he is substance without life. The thought disturbs her, so she pushes it away. This is her dream, in the end, and she can avoid certain thoughts if she chooses. 

She’d fallen asleep in a thin shirt and nothing below her waist except her underwear, which is nothing more than a small scrap of linen tied at her hips. The knot is loose. Ben stares at her hands as she unties one side and pushes the underwear down her thigh, then his eyes roam over her legs and her stomach as if he’s ravenous for the sight of her. His gaze settles on her privates for just a moment, and Rey feels the slightest pulse of... _ something _ in her mind—a thrill, a scrap of joy so powerful it edges on panic—that doesn’t seem to be her own. 

He kisses her again, and she forgets about it. The pressure of his mouth journeys lower, and lower, then halts at her stomach. 

It’s a dream. 

She can do anything she wants in a dream. 

As he begins to travel back up her torso, she pushes hard on his shoulders and then his head, so his mouth is level with her cunt. 

His eyes flick to hers, wide and eager. Excitement pulses within her (again, it doesn’t feel to be  _ all _ hers).

“You want...me to do this?” he asks, as if her shove wasn’t clear enough.

Rey nods until his mouth connects. Her gasping moan seems too loud, too obscene. Is she moaning like this outside the dream? Not that anyone will hear, or care. 

He’s sucking at her, licking along every ridge and dip of her drenched skin. It’s nothing like the other nights. Where those were warm and realistic, this one is more dreamlike: she feels the pressure of his mouth, the dig of his fingers, the soft brush of his hair on her thighs, but neither the heat of his lips nor the wet drag of his tongue. There’s a tingle at his touch, and Rey isn’t sure if it’s coming from him or her. 

His transparency disquiets her; she can see her trembling legs through his head and torso, so she closes her eyes and lets the sensations rise high. He's doing this with less finesse than Poe, making up for experience with enthusiasm. 

Rey glances at Ben when he takes his mouth from her, and he fixes her with an alarmed stare. 

“Wait,” he says, “less finesse than—”

She pushes his head back down. Odd, she hadn't thought she'd spoken that aloud. There’s a pressure in her mind, a curious nudge. As soon as the image of Poe and Zorii though the communication screen appears in her memories, that nudge disappears, something akin to relieved amusement left in its wake. 

He’s going harder, and her climax looms close by like a skittish creature. If only he would focus a little more on— But then he is, and he’s  _ intently _ focused and— 

Pleasure rockets through her limbs and Rey cries out with it, gripping the blankets and arching her back into the stiff pallet. 

Sweat prickles on her chest and her neck. Her heart thunders against her ribs. Any moment now, the light will come through that damned window she still can’t manage to seal, he’ll disappear into the morning, and she’ll have to wrangle her boneless body into some semblance of function. 

Rey opens her eyes. The room is dark. A cool breeze nudges at one of the makeshift curtains, and through the gap, she can see a faint crescent of one of the moons.

There’s a blue glow on the bed, and when Rey glances at it, her breath seizes.

Ben is still here. Still blue. Still slightly transparent. He’s hovering at her knees, staring at her as if he’s convinced she’s going to disappear too and he isn’t sure how long he’ll have before she does. 

Alarm hits her first, and her unthinking response is to scramble backward on the pallet. 

He’s here.

_ He’s here. _

Ben blinks rapidly at her, then his face contorts into uneasiness. “I overstepped,” he says. “I shouldn’t have—”

Rey can feel her pulse in her ears and her wrists and her temples. 

“No, that’s not…” What can she say? What  _ should _ she say? Every coherent thought is shattering even as she tries to grasp at it. It’s impossible. She’s still dreaming. 

Rey grips the back of her forearm and pinches the skin, hard, between her thumb and forefinger. Nothing changes. Nothing wavers, nothing fades. 

How is this possible? He had been gone. Completely gone. She had waited for a feeling, or a whisper, or  _ anything, _ and when she’d received only silence for weeks, she had forced herself to stop hoping. 

And now...

Through the whirl of her thoughts, she realizes he’s reaching out to her tentatively, one pale blue arm extended. 

“Rey?” His voice sounds muffled, and she can’t tell if it’s because of the remnants of her orgasm, or because this is how he sounds now. 

_ How he sounds now. _ Like this will be the new norm. This is how she’ll have to accept his return, as a ghost, as a scrap of what he had once been. Where had he gone, in the time between Exegol and the present? Or...where had he been trapped? 

Worry creases his forehead and tightens his lips. He’s thinking about her, about what they have just…

Rey swallows. “I liked it. What you did.” It’s difficult to talk through the thickness in her throat. She’s suddenly aware that she’s mostly naked. The blankets have been flung to the side and she’s sitting before Ben with the insides of her thighs damp from her arousal and her cunt practically on display. She grabs the corner of one blanket and pulls it to cover herself. As she sees his expression shutter, she realizes the action has made her statement ring unbearably false.

A muscle twitches in Ben’s cheek. “But you hadn’t wanted it.” He clumsily moves off the bed to stand. “That's why you backed away. After. You didn’t want me to—”

“I didn’t know it was real,” Rey blurts.

Ben flinches as if the words have pricked him, and he turns away from her. His fists clench at his sides. “So you’d prefer I wasn’t here.”

“That’s not—”

“Oh,” he says, spinning to face her. “Right. When it’s assuredly fake, you revel in my presence. Only then.” 

She sees in this the faded scars of his past, the anger and frustration and isolation. He can’t hold still and it seems like he wants to walk out but can’t bring himself to pass through the door. 

And what of her own scars? Has he no thought for  _ them? _

“You left!” Rey cries, which freezes him. His mouth drifts open, and she blunders on. “I’d found you. I’d finally found  _ you, _ and you left.” Her voice breaks. She’s spent so much effort suppressing her grief that now, given an outlet, it explodes forth. Tears track down her cheeks. She doesn’t bother to swipe them away. “Everyone always leaves, somehow. And for the first time, I thought...that you were the one who wouldn’t. But you did. You were gone, Ben. I saw it. I watched it happen. I used to be able to feel you. All the time. Even when you hated who I was—”

He shakes his head viciously. “I never hated who you were.” 

“Then when you...when you hated who I was with. But I could feel you. And then you went away and I felt nothing.” Her nose has started to run; she feels like a child as she drags the back of her hand across it. “I’d...I’d told myself you weren’t coming back, and I hated that I had to just...accept it. And there was no one I could tell. You were gone, and no one else even— It was like you hadn’t been there at all.” 

She’s gasping for breath, unsure if Ben can understand anything she’s saying, but she keeps going. “Not a single person would be able to understand that I would never want to forget you. And now you’re here, and I don’t understand why, or how and all I know is that you’re going to leave again. Because whenever I think I’ve found you…I can’t get you to stay.”

Rey curls forward, unable to stop the sobs that wrack her whole body. Hot tears drip onto her bare stomach, and her hands shake as she buries them in the blanket. 

The pallet dips under Ben’s weight. His grief rises up to match her own, and Rey realizes with a start the emotions that brushed up against her earlier had been his. She can feel him again, and though he’s not as strong a presence in her mind as he once was, he’s _here,_ and _real,_ and Gods, it only makes her shake harder. 

Arms wrap around her and hold her close. If Rey closes her eyes, she can pretend the chest she nestles against isn’t blue, isn’t glowing; she can pretend when she pulls away, the black tunic will be damp from her tears.

“I won’t...” he murmurs at her temple. He runs his hands up and down her back. “I won’t leave again.” 

She clutches at his collar. “Don’t make that promise. Don’t you dare tell me that if you can’t keep it.” 

His only response is to hold her until her sobs fade. She sniffs and pulls away from him. 

“Why are you back? How?” Rey hates the question and what the answer could mean. Is it better to know and dread? Or be ignorant and blissful? 

Ben works his closed mouth, and when she feels a dull pinch in her own cheek, she knows he’s bitten his. 

“I don’t know,” he says. “I shouldn’t be.” 

“Don’t say that.” 

He shakes his head. The motion wards off the hand Rey was about to press to his cheek, and he takes her hand in his and squeezes it. 

“Rey, I was…” He sucks in a sharp breath. “I’ve done terrible things. I’ve hurt… I’ve hurt you. My fath— I’ve been complicit to...horrors.” 

There’s a haunted look in his eye. Suddenly, Rey understands how foolish she had been to try and separate him into two disparate people, assigning the good deeds to one and the villainous actions to the other. She had thought that on the half-submerged wreckage she had killed Kylo in order to bring Ben to life, but the concept strikes her now as naïve; the man at her side is the sum of them both, with a single bundle of aching memories. 

His hand tightens on hers. “When I was in that pit, feeling my life leech out, I thought it would be best to stay there. Let it end. It’s what I deserved.” 

_ No! _ Rey wants to shout. She swallows it. “But you didn’t stay,” she says instead. 

A distant look grows on Ben’s face, along with a ghost of a smile. Rey flinches at the poor word choice, despite its accuracy. 

“I saw him,” Ben said. “Dar— My grandfather. Anakin,” he adds at her frown. “Or, maybe...I don’t know. Maybe I didn’t see him.” He stares at the blanket between them. “But I heard him. Knew it was him. He said I ‘needed to do what he could not.’ I was confused. It was so dark, and cold, and I had already decided I would give up. Then I felt you—” He breaks off, as if he can’t bear to say the words. 

Rey shuffles closer to him and rests her free hand on his knee. 

“When I found you, and you were already cold—” Ben’s voice breaks and he takes a second to compose himself. His shoulders rise with his deep breath. “I thought he might still be nearby, so I looked around for him, but I just heard him say it again. And then I… I knew what I had to do.” He says it like it had been the simplest decision in the world. 

Rey suddenly feels exhausted. She has so many questions still, the pack of them buzzing around and bumping against her like flies, and she wants to ask every single one, yet there’s a bone-deep tiredness settling upon her. It reminds her of the way she’d felt after she had healed Ben on the wreckage—like she’d given up part of herself, withdrawn some of her life. 

There’s something to be said about that: a connection here, between the healing and the ache and Ben, and it must be wholly obvious. To another, perhaps, at a different time. She’s not entirely certain what she’s feeling isn’t due to the orgasm.

“You should sleep,” she hears Ben say. 

Rey shakes her head even as she yawns. “I can’t. Can you?” 

“Don’t think I need to. But you should.”

He eases them down to the pallet together and pulls the blanket over her. She’s still half-naked, and the fabric is scratchy on her bare skin. 

Her eyelids feel heavy. She wants to keep looking at him, keep taking how strange it is that the walls don’t reflect his glow while anything shiny does. 

“Sleep,” he says, voice hushed. 

His shirt is thick between her fingers as she grips it. One of her fingers hooks into the hole to try and tether him solely by that. 

“What is this?” she whispers. “What’s happening?” 

“I’m trying to get you to sleep.” 

“No, I mean—”

“I know.” He huffs a soft laugh through his nose. “Let’s figure it out tomorrow.” 

Her eyes have closed without her permission and she can’t find the energy to open them. “What if… What if you’re not here then? What if this is all a dream?”

“Then it’s one of the better dreams I’ve had.” 

“Ben…” she chides.

“Turn around.” 

The command takes her by surprise. “What?”

“Turn.”

“Don’t start thinking you can order me around like this. One word, all...order-y.” She’s slurring by the end, and it takes all of her concentration to roll so she’s facing away from him. As soon as she settles, he starts to sift his fingers through her unbound hair, and the hard pallet becomes so utterly alluring beneath her that it’s as if it has been made from clouds. 

“And will you just lie there all night? It’ll be...boring.” 

He sweeps her hair over her shoulder, lock by lock, and Rey drifts into unconsciousness, though not before she hears his response:

“Never,” he says.

-

He’s still holding her when she wakes up.


	2. Chapter 2

Ben wanders around the homestead as she makes adjustments on the vaporators. They had been filtering water perfectly up until this morning; after a deafening bang, only single droplets have emerged from the spigot. 

He’d hovered at her side while providing wholly useless advice, and when she’d snapped in irritation that he obviously had no experience with vaporators, he grumbled and let her work in peace. 

Rey snakes her arm into a cramped panel, groping blindly. It could be a slipped gear, or maybe a split hose. Easier to focus on this than the partially transparent man currently poking at one of the walls. 

They still haven’t spoken about his return. 

She’d woken with a start, terrified he’d no longer be beside her, yet when she turned quickly on the cot, he hadn’t appeared to have moved all night. He’d given her a warm smile, slid his hand up her arm, and then the vaporator had seemingly exploded. 

So she’s been elbow-deep in wires, unable to ask the thousand questions of Ben she wants to ask. Not that she couldn’t talk and work, but…it feels different, now that he’s here. In the almost sort of way he is. Unlike in the blissful fogginess of a dream, his presence here makes her jittery. It makes her think of the things she’d done to him in those dreams, the things she’d  _ said. _ How bold she’d been. She still isn’t certain how much of what had happened was only in her own head. And what if he experienced them too? What does he expect to follow?

Inside the vaporator, Rey’s grease-smeared fingers slip on a bit of tubing. If she could just follow it to its termination… Her fingers slip again and she curses. She pulls her arm out to wipe her hand on a filthy scrap of fabric. Sand clings to the fabric, her hand, and the globs of grease dotting her forearm. 

Ben continues to poke at the wall. He hasn’t strayed out of her sight—or maybe it’s that he doesn’t want to let her out of his. She watches as he furrows his brow, then pushes his hand  _ through _ the wall. He lets out a short, delighted laugh and spins to Rey. 

“Did you see—” he starts.

“Yep.” 

She can feel his frown from across the courtyard. The rag is so saturated that it’s begun to smear grease over her skin instead of take it away. 

“It feels like you’re mad.” 

He’s appeared suddenly at her elbow, and Rey shrieks in surprise, barely managing not to tip over into the sand. 

“Sorry,” Ben mutters, though he doesn’t appear to mean it. “Didn’t know I could do that.” 

Rey catches her breath. “I”m not...I’m not mad.”

He crosses his arms. “I can feel your emotions. You’re mad. Why?”

A sharp retort sits on her tongue. She almost lets it fly when she realizes she’s treating him in the same way she’s been treating the droid: as if there’s no point in sharing her thoughts, since they wouldn’t be understood. 

Rey glances up at the ghost of the man who has understood her more than anyone else in her life, and tosses the grubby rag to the ground with a sigh. “I’m not mad at  _ you. _ I’m just…” She gestures to the vaporator. “Frustrated. I don’t know what’s happening with this. And I don’t know…” Her gaze slides to him. “And I don’t know what’s happening with you. Still.” 

Ben squats beside her with his elbows on his knees. He picks up a wrench and fiddles with it, tracing the edges and the stamped logo on the handle. 

“I thought a lot last night, while you slept,” he says. “And all I could figure is that when I gave you my— Gave my life force to you…” He chews on his cheek once more. “Maybe it’s still there.” 

His eyes flick to her dirty hand when she lays it on her chest. 

“I think I’ve been able to feel it,” she says. “There’s...something here. Not mine. Not bad,” she adds at his look of concern. “But if what you’re saying is possible, it might be you.” The memory of last night’s dream comes to her, where she’d put more of herself into that nesting piece of him. She tells him, and he nods, considering. 

“I wonder…” Ben’s brows pinch together.

“What?”

“We were fated. Bonded. A dyad. Maybe that’s why this is possible.”

“I...I hadn’t thought it mattered anymore.”

Ben gives her a wry glance. “I think it’ll take more than a sith lord sucking the life out of both of us to erase the universe’s designs.” 

Rey laughs a little at that.

He goes on, “But you gave me more of your life. Your energy. That might be why I’m here now. Able to interact with...things.” He twirls the wrench as if to demonstrate, and Rey is caught up by his nimble fingers. She can’t think of what she had imagined them doing to her, not with him so close. Almost too late, she catches the pause he’d given before ‘things.’ She’s a ‘thing.’ He’d been able to interact with  _ her. _

It’s nearly impossible not to think of his mouth on her privates. Perhaps she’s let the thought slip, or perhaps Ben’s mind is traveling along the same path, but the look he flicks to her is a heady blend of intrigue and arousal. 

Rey feels herself flush. “Is this even how the Force works?” 

“You’re the one with the books.”

“I… I left the books.” 

He visibly starts, intrigue turning into shock. “What? Where?”

“With Fi— Oh, it doesn’t matter. I didn’t think I needed them anymore.”

Ben gapes at her, his mouth opening and closing around words that don’t seem to come. Though he’s more monochromatic than he’d been in life, Rey sees his face pale. 

“I’d read all of them anyway—” 

He finds his words, then. “You didn’t think you needed irreplaceable, thousand-year-old texts describing rituals, and...and doctrines older than... Books about things that don’t exist anymore, that…that…” He begins to stammer and gesticulate wildly. “Everything I learned about the Force—everything  _ you’ve _ — It came from someone who had learned from someone who had learned from those books, and now they’re just…” 

The image of one of those books beneath a pile of soiled clothes pops into Rey’s mind and— _ kriff _ —Ben must see that too, for his eyes widen and he sways backward. “On the  _ floor _ ?” 

“I’ll get them!” Rey cries before he can have an aneurysm (which...is that even possible in his state?) “I’ll have them sent, and then you can fret over caf stains or dog-eared pages. And did  _ you _ even read them, ever?” 

“No, but—” He breaks off, stares at the vaporator, then closes his eyes. His jaw clenches. He sniffs in a deep breath through his nose and expels it through puffed cheeks. Rey can imagine this as a sort of desperate meditation, and as he takes another breath, the few pieces of maintenance equipment that have floated into the air cease their furious vibrations and return to the sand. 

“Sorry,” Rey says when the last of the objects have landed. Had she been an idiot to leave such priceless books with Finn? He’d promised he’d use them, though she’d expected it to be in more of the ‘reading’ sense and less of the ‘rug’ sense.

“No, you’re right,” Ben says. He drags a hand through his hair. A few locks stick up in an endearing, befuddled sort of way, and as difficult as it is to see him in this partial existence, at least he still has those little pieces of himself. “They’re old, but they’re not... _ everything. _ There’s always more,” he finishes in a murmur.

That’s what she’d said to herself, a few days ago. In Luke’s voice in her head. The memory tugs on the memory of her truncated conversation with Leia, and the words she’d scoffed at but now seem startlingly obvious:  _ All you need is inside you. _

Rey bites her lip. 

“So a part of you lives in me.” She raises her hand to her chest once more. There’s going to be a grease smear on the white. It doesn’t matter; she’s begun to hate the colorlessness of her clothing. “Because—” She breaks off when she sees Ben suppressing a giggle. A crooked smirk dimples one cheek. 

“Did I say something funny?”

He looks at her, slightly startled. “Oh, no. I...no.” 

“What?” Rey asks.

“Nothing. It’s—” Ben shakes his head. “A bad joke.”

She nudges his ghostly hand with hers. “I like jokes.” 

He gives the vaporater a little smile, and when he looks at her, there’s a mischievous cast to his expression. “Another part of me would love to live inside you, but I'm not sure that's realistic.”

Rey's blush scalds her cheeks and she stumbles to her feet.”Ben!” It's meant to be scolding; she can only manage to sound breathless. 

He settles onto his heels, relishing her shock. His smirk widens. “I mean, you need to be able to walk around. Fix things. Battle sand people. How could you do that with my cock deep in your—”

“BEN!” Rey whirls on him. How can this man be the same man who’d nearly blasted her tools across the homestead? The same man who had once terrified her? Where in hell did this cocky bastard come from? “You shouldn't say— It isn't—”

He shrugs off her panic. “Who's around to hear? There's only you and me. Think of this as revenge for the mislaid ancient Jedi texts.” His eyes flick to hers. “And I’m not sure what you’re so embarrassed about; we’ve done quite a bit, in your sleep.” 

Rey can’t hear anything but the rush of blood in her ears. So they were shared dreams, then. 

_ Gods. _

Every act they did together goes through her, one after another, each one lighting its own little fire.

In her ears, the rush gets louder. 

Her skin feels as if it’s about to combust. 

But Ben just tips his head appraisingly, swings his legs out in front of him, crosses them, and leans back on his outstretched palms. 

“W-what?” Rey manages.

One corner of his mouth twitches into a smile. “I like it when you blush.”

She clenches her hands to hide their trembling. “So you...experienced…” 

“Yep.” 

“You saw all of…”  _ Me? _

“Yep.” 

Her chest flutters. She isn’t sure if it’s coming from herself or from him, and because she has to focus on something other than his smirk—it’s doing strange things to her insides that feel awfully similar to the first time she was airsick—she focuses on that singular spot, the one beneath her sternum, the one that is partially inhabited by him. 

Rey scrunches her eyes closed and digs her fingers into the filthy fabric. Energy screams through her fingers and into the spot—into him. 

She hears Ben’s sharp gasp and the scuff of sand as he scrambles to his feet. She feels his excitement, and then, as the energy builds in a crescendo and a prism of lights brighter than any sun dance behind her eyelids, there’s a tug at her insides, like something is hammering at her ribs and trying to escape. It might be her heart. It might be her lungs, because she isn’t sure if she’s able to breathe at the moment. Vertigo buckles her legs, and instead of Ben’s excitement, she feels his terror. 

“Stop!”

It’s almost free. Whatever’s there is is almost free.

“Rey! You have to stop, now!”

Her name, his voice, his hands closing around her upper arms.

The brilliant, colorful lights fade and she blinks in the harsh glare of the Tatooine suns. She’s sprawled in his lap. She must have fallen, and he caught her before she could hit the sand. 

Rey rubs the side of her face and eases herself into a sitting position. Her head swims at the change. Ben keeps a hand on her arm as she moves, as if he can’t bear to stop touching her. His face is a wash of barely-contained anxiety. 

“You shouldn’t have done that,” he snaps. 

Rey is too tired to argue, though she manages to roll her eyes. “It didn’t work, anyway.” She bends forward and stretches the abruptly-tight muscles in her back.

When Ben says nothing, she looks over her shoulder at him. He’s staring at his outstretched hand, and as she stares at him in turn, she realizes that he’s...brighter. It’s difficult to see the walls through him, almost like he’s become less diluted. A breeze dips into the courtyard and catches a few wayward locks of his hair. 

“What does this mean?” Rey murmurs. 

He shakes his head, still staring at his hand. He turns it over, wiggles his fingers, snaps. 

What would have happened if she had kept going? How much of herself could she—

“No,” Ben says abruptly, and his gaze snaps to her. “Don’t go down that path. Don’t do what…”

“What you did for me?” 

He purses his lips and glowers at the pile of tools. 

Rey unscrews the lid of her canteen and drinks. The water is from the  _ Falcon _ and tastes far better than anything that’s come out of the vaporator. 

“I don’t think I could have done much more, in any case,” she says. “Whatever is in me, it doesn’t feel strong enough to leave yet.” 

Ben leans toward her. “‘Yet?’”

She takes another swig from the canteen, and is a second away from asking he if he wants any when she realizes it wouldn’t do him any good. “I don’t know. It’s…” She sighs and screws the lid back on. “I don’t know.”

They sit together in the sand. Tawny birds wheel overhead, having glimpsed the glint of a tool or a polished part. Nothing for them to eat, but they don’t know that. 

The feelings coming from Ben start to settle and calm. Rey picks up on the flare of an impish attitude right before he speaks.

“I’m sure the books mention something about this.”

Rey growls at him. “Shut up.”

“If only we had them.”

“Shut up.”

“What gracious wisdom could we be reading at this very moment?”

Rey spins around and smacks his chest. “Shut up!” She’s laughing though, as is he: his is a low, huffing, unpracticed sort of laugh, and it reminds her of an old piece of machinery moving for the first time in decades. He dodges a few unmalicious swipes before grabbing her wrists in a loose hold. 

“They also might mention why the dreams let us fuck,” he says with a grin.

She lets out an outraged shriek and throws herself at him, knocking another one of those laughs—a chortle, really, would be the best word for it—from his chest. They tumble together into the sand with Rey sprawled on top of him. He’s warmer against her than he’d been before. Firmer. She can feel both his laughter and the feather-light beat of his heart beneath her palms. 

Her hair is loose; she hasn’t felt the need to smear grease over her head in order to put it up in the buns today. Ben rubs a lock of it between his fingers. His expression turns honest.

“I missed you.” 

He’s said that to her in a recent dream, yet she remembers a similar whisper as she slept on a cot on Ajan Kloss, said while she’d been too busy or too worried with other things to process it.

Beneath her, his look is one of love and grief, and she can hardly breathe for the bitterness within her. 

How  _ dare _ the universe be this way? How dare it decide what to give and what to take, and when it’s time to do either? 

Fury won’t change a thing though, so instead of pursuing it, she presses her lips to Ben’s and kisses him with all the wanting she never was allowed to let him have. He cups her head, holds her close, and returns every bit of it. 

Too late, Rey hears a grinding squeal from the vaporator. There’s a hiss, a high-pitched rattle, and then oil erupts in a wide spray over the sand and the tools and Rey. 

She hates this place. 

She hates its suns. She loathes its food. She absolutely, utterly detests the moisture vaporators needed to live here for longer than a week.

It’s finally ruined her once-white clothes though, which is the only positive outcome from this situation.

The oil doesn’t stick to Ben; either that, or it’s gone through him. He tries to suppress his laughter when she glares at him through the greasy strands of her hair. 

It takes several more hours until she finds the source of the leak, and it’s nearly sunset when finally,  _ finally, _ the vaporator churns out liquid. Not sludge, but what emerges isn’t clear, either. Good enough. She’ll finish tomorrow. 

Never has the  _ Falcon _ ’s ‘fresher seemed more attractive. Ben follows her as she trudges up the sandy hill.

“You don’t need to bathe,” she tosses over her shoulder at him. “And don’t you hate this ship?” 

He shrugs. “What else is there for me to do? And I don’t hate this ship.” The glare he aims at the cockpit says otherwise. 

Rey scoffs. 

“I don’t hate it.” His sigh is loud even over the mechanical whirr of the lowering door. “It’s just… Other ships have better associations. Literally any other ship in the galaxy.” 

“Dramatic.” 

He narrows his eyes at her in response.

“And no one’s telling you to live on this one.”

“ _ Live _ on it? A sarlacc pit would be more welco—” 

He breaks off as BB-8 rolls halfway down the ramp and freezes. 

Rey’s stomach drops. The droid looks at Ben. Ben looks at the droid. 

BB-8 emits a cluster of beeps that sound like a frantic scream and spins up the ramp so quickly he leaves a trail of sparks. 

_HERE!_ _I NEED TO ALERT THEM! FIRST ORDER IS HERE! THEY’RE BACK!_

Rey surges up the ramp after the droid, and though she shouts at him to stop, he keeps speeding toward the cockpit. 

_ POE HAS TO KNOW! EVERYONE HAS TO— _

His squeals cut off when he realizes he’s floating in the air, immobilized. His head rotates around to aim at Rey. She isn’t sure how a cluster of sensors and antennas can appear so betrayed. 

_ Rey…? _

“It’s… Ben’s…” She bites her lip, takes a heavy breath, then begins to talk. She tells the droid about everything that happened on Exegol. And she speaks of the bond, the dyad—whatever the kriff it is—and the dreams (censored, of course). The story sounds ridiculous to her own ears. It’s the first time she’s ever spoken of any of it to someone not directly involved, and the longer she talks, the more outlandish it seems.

“Please don’t tell them. Not yet,” she finishes. “Not until I… Until I know what to say. How to say it.” 

BB-8’s antennas vibrate. He’s still floating. Rey lowers him slowly as a show of good will, and only when he doesn’t immediately flee to the cockpit does she allow herself to relax.

_ Is this why you’ve been angry with me? _

“I haven’t been—”

_ Yes, you have.  _

She rubs a greasy hand along a greasy arm. “Yes. I have. And I’m sorry. I didn’t know what I was feeling, or why I was feeling it. And it was easier to ignore than to question. I don’t know how to talk, sometimes. To friends.”

_ I’m quite good at listening. _

“I… I know you are. I’d forgotten that.” She kneels, sitting on her feet. Ben’s presence remains at the base of the ramp, and she can feel his uncertainty, as if her description of what’s happened is strange to him as well. “I was mean. And dumb. I’m sorry.” 

The droid rolls forward to bump against her outstretched hand. 

_ I’m also quite good at forgiving.  _

Rey smiles. That, at least, she hasn’t forgotten. 

-

She spent too much time in the ‘fresher, but the tanks will reuse most of the water, and,  _ Gods, _ it feels wonderful to be clean. It’s dark by the time she and Ben return to the homestead. After a few scarfed bites of womp rat, Rey collapses onto her pallet with Ben lying next to her, his face inches from hers. 

Although he’s less transparent, he doesn’t seem to be brighter in the dim room. Maybe he’s figured out how to dim himself like he’s a filament. 

Her forearms ache from hours spent with the spanner. Could the Force have helped with any of what she’d done? Probably; she’s lived so much of her life fixing things without it that it’s never occurred to her until now that she could have reached inside crevices and sealed fissures using more than just her hands. 

She can feel herself drifting into sleep and struggles against it. She still has questions to ask.

“Where did you go?” Rey says, and when Ben frowns in confusion, she continues. “When you went away. When you...disappeared.” 

Ben lets out a slow sigh. She expects it to warm her face, or even tickle the fine hairs at her temple, but it’s as intangible as anything from her dreams. Will she ever be able to feel him—really  _ feel _ him—again? She’ll settle for a puff of air, if nothing else. 

Ben shifts. “It was bright,” he says, closing his eyes as if to focus on memory. “Comfortable. It felt like standing in sunlight and never having to worry about your skin burning. I saw my mother. My family. I wondered if I’d interrupted a reunion, because it seemed to be a huge celebration. I hugged people I hadn’t hugged in years. Some that I’d never seen. But I knew them all, somehow, even the old masters, and heroes I’d only read about in histories or heard mentioned in tall tales.”

Rey tries not to think about how she’d only seen darkness and emptiness in death. Does it balance, somehow, that she was visited before she’d died, while Ben only had the single voice of his grandfather before he’d disappeared? 

After all that’s happened, she finds she has a hard time believing in the truth and wisdom of ‘balance’ anymore.’

“I tried to be happy,” Ben continues, “because it seemed like it should be the end. It could have been easy to be happy there. But I kept feeling like there was something I’d left undone. I don’t know how long I was there; time sort of...stopped. Then I was...I don’t know. Elsewhere. Somewhere darker, and smaller. I wasn’t frightened by it.” 

He opens his eyes and lets his gaze roam slowly over her face. One corner of his mouth twitches upward. She wonders if she’ll ever get used to his smiles; they’ve been so rare she considers them precious, like shining baubles she’s found in the desert. 

“Then I saw you,” he says. “I didn’t think you were real. You looked so frightened at first.”

Rey swallows and remembers the night she’d cried into the dusty pillow. She squeezes his hand. 

“I saw you again, and again. Each time, it felt as if I was underwater and you were at a shore and every time you came to me, I’d get closer to the surface.”

“And now you’re here.” She wiggles closer to him and pretends it’s his breath stirring her hair instead of the breeze from outside. 

Ben rumbles out a ‘mmm.’ He drapes his arm over her waist, his fingers a light touch on her back. “And now I’m here.” 

-

The dream begins the same way as the one the previous night. 

Currents buffet her along through space, and ribbons of light move in leisurely twists above her as if they are living things. It’s brighter up ahead; the horizon glows, and with every second, she comes closer to it. A bolt of light spears through the air in front of her—not the pale blue of her own power, but the same yellow-gold as her lightsaber. 

She isn’t alone here. 

The same moment she realizes Ben is beside her, he reaches out and grabs her hand. He’s no longer blue, and he feels as solid as he has the other nights. 

“Is this a dream?” she says. Her voice has a strange echoing quality that reminds her of shouting in the wreckage of a star destroyer. 

Ben is staring into the glow. “No,” he mutters. “Or...not mine, at least.”

As they’ve come closer to that glow, she can see cracks within it, like the horizon is fracturing. 

“How can you tell?” 

He gives her a quick glance, then looks at the lightstorm ahead. “You’re wearing too many clothes.” 

Rey’s about to call him out on joking at what appears to be the least opportune time, but there isn’t any humor in him. She glances down; she’s wearing what she’d changed into after the ‘fresher—a tunic and heathered grey leggings.  _ Too many clothes. _ What would he dream of, then? 

Can she flush in a dream? Can she actually feel arousal race along her skin like it’s lightning, or is this just another case of her mind supplying sensations where there are none?

Though, according to Ben, this isn’t a dream. 

There isn’t time to pursue such thoughts further. The fractured glow is brighter, and wilder, and  _ stars, _ it feels like it’s soaking into her skin and bones. She would bask here for years if she could. 

When she glances at Ben to see if he appears to feel the same, she cries out; he’s begun to fade. Just as he’d done before. 

_ Not again, _ Rey screams within her head.  _ Not again. _

She grabs onto Ben and wraps her arms around his torso tight enough to make her muscles ache. The thing beneath her sternum thrashes like it’s trying to get free, and Rey presses her chest to his, because maybe that will let it out, maybe that will let it return home. She holds him tighter.  _ Tighter. _

The light swirls around them so brightly she can see it through her closed eyelids. She reaches out with her thoughts, and her feelings, and  _ everything, _ and now she can sense the gaps within Ben, the little pieces of himself that are still missing. There’s energy within her, rejuvenated since she’d last tried to withdraw it, and she pushes that life force into the spots in Ben where there is none. He becomes warmer under her hands, his chest expands with rapid breaths. 

Yet even as he becomes stronger and more tangible, she can feel herself fading. A glimpse at her bare arm shows his black shirt to be visible through her bicep. Perhaps she should be feeling grateful they’ve had the brief moments gifted to them by the fate, that she was able to find him after the miseries of their youths. Or she should simply appreciate that, in the chaotic tumble of the universe, they knew each other at all.

She’s too furious for that though. 

She’d cursed the universe before, at its blindness when it came time to give and take, and she will curse it again. 

As her anger burns hot and bright within, and as she prepares to use it to fill one last remaining crack in Ben—there’s a spot by his forehead, she can feel it—a hand lands on her shoulder. 

Not Ben’s; it’s smaller, older, the skin thin as parchment across the tendons on the back. A ring of stone and metal sits upon one finger. 

_ The rest isn’t yours to give. _

Leia’s voice rings out in Rey’s head. She feels Ben’s startled jerk, and he tries to move out of her embrace, but she keeps him held tight out of fear that if she stops touching him, even for an instant, he’ll fade. Or, maybe it is that she will fade. Neither option is acceptable. 

Leia’s joy radiates through Rey, along with her desperation for this—whatever ‘this’ is—to work. And then it isn’t just Leia’s joy flowing into Rey, but her energy, and her life force, and it fills up both of their cracks and makes them whole once more.

The lightning reaches a visual crescendo. Flashes come one after another until the air is livid with brilliant light, and against her skin it’s somehow both as warm as the desert and as chill as midnight. 

There’s a swift rush of vertigo and in an instant, Rey is lying on the hard pallet on Tatooine.

She doesn’t have to open her eyes to know that something has changed. She can smell the sultry, heady aroma of his skin and his hair. And she can feel him. There’s the dip in the mattress from his weight, and the unbelievable heat from his body, and—oh,  _ there— _ the skipping, vivid beat of his presence in the Force. 

Her eyes open to the darkened room and even if she can’t see his features, she can see the outline of him. She brings her hand to his face, fingertips feathered over his cheek. A lock of hair curls around her knuckle. 

“Ben…?” As she gasps his name, she hears his shaking exhalation and a soft cry as if he’s broken off the first part of a laugh. 

She lets her hands roam more freely over his shoulders, his chest, his neck, his arms, feeling the tension in his muscles and the supple give of his body, and it  _ can’t _ be real, because then it would be too lovely, too beautiful— But he’s touching her now too, and those large hands slide up her sides and grip her hard enough to shove away any doubts. 

She had initiated the kiss once, and she does so again, throwing herself forward until her lips collide with his. He’d been almost hesitant for their first kiss; as if he might startle her if he made any attempt to deepen it. As if, somehow—after he’d fought his way to her, and then stood at her side, and then brought her back from the empty blackness of death—she would consider him a letch if he used his tongue. 

Not now, though. He must have left his uncertainty on Exegol. 

Ben’s mouth slants over hers, and as his arms wrap tightly about her, his tongue flicks over her bottom lip and slides inside. 

This is a sloppy kiss. It lacks both the foggy perfection of the dreams and the tenderness of what had come before. It’s vibrant, and rough, and blissfully awkward. Neither of them seems to care that, at times, they’re missing each other’s mouths. 

Ben abruptly takes his lips from hers and trails his open mouth to her cheeks, then the edge of her jaw, then her neck, unable to focus on one single spot. He’s licking her skin and nipping at it as if he’s frantic to taste every part of her. 

Rey clutches at him and as he nuzzles her neck, she buries her nose in his thick hair. But his movements keep him away from her face;  _ she _ wants to taste. 

She pushes him to his back and straddles his waist. He’s so wide that sitting like this strains the insides of her thighs. There’s an intriguing hardness nudging at her ass through her leggings. Warmth skitters low in her belly at the thought of that part of him so close and so excited. 

His arms—thick, warm, firm—wrap around her back and he lets out a ragged groan as she sucks on the skin right above his collarbone, laving it with her tongue and clamping down with her teeth. He tastes like smoke and citrus, hot metal and crisped sugar. 

Another groan bursts from Ben, and his hips buck up in a motion that seems involuntary. His cock bumps against her once more, hard and insistent. 

They’ve been in darkness for too long. Rey reaches out with the Force to the lantern by the door and flips its switch. 

Part of her must have still been expecting him to be blue and transparent, for when she sees him illuminated by the warm light, her heart somersaults in her chest. 

_ Gods, _ he’s real. He’s real, and he’s beautiful, and his hair is rumpled from her fingers, and his kiss-reddened lips are slightly parted, and his ears— _ kriff, _ his wonderful ears—are tinged with pink. There’s a rosy spot on his neck above the collar of his black tunic from where she’d sucked his skin. 

Ben pushes himself up on an elbow. His dark eyes roam over her in the same ravenous way she’s been doing to him, then settle on the old scar on her upper arm. He brushes it with a fingertip, then trails his fingers across her collarbone to her sternum and to the soft, tender skin at the hollow of her throat. 

He blinks when she reaches out and traces the invisible path of his absent scar, over moles and rough stubble, down over the sharp edge of his jaw. 

She’d done this in one of the dreams with her tongue. And oh, how he’d liked it. She’s remembering the other parts of the dreams now, too: the feel of his cock in her hand, his fingers in her cunt, his ragged groans as he bucked into her. 

In her time alone, she must have become quite poor at maintaining the barriers between her mind and another’s. 

Ben’s eyes snap to hers, and his desire radiates from him like the heat off an engine. His palm rests against her chest; his hand is so large that his thumb and pinky press into her breasts. 

“What do you want?” It comes out as a rasp. 

What does she want? 

Rey has never been used to entertaining those sorts of thoughts. She’s always had to focus on survival, or the mission, or the fate of the entire fucking galaxy. ‘Want’ is for people who already ‘have.’ 

Ben’s body scalds her thighs through her leggings. He’ll listen to whatever she answers, she’s certain, whether it’s a long walk in the dirt or to have their bodies in a sweaty, exhausted tangle. 

What does she want? 

“You,” she says. “I want you, all of you, Ben...I—”

He interrupts her by seizing the front of her sleep shirt in his fist and tugging her down to him. Their mouths meet in a kiss so fierce she can feel it in her toes. His nose presses into her cheek, and his hands pin her hips and pull them flush with his. 

There’ll be bruises from his grip. Good. She can feel wetness gathering between her legs and as she rubs herself against him, she wonders if he can—

No, of course he can’t tell. The leggings are in the way. Rey struggles off Ben and slides to her feet beside the bed. Her shirt comes off easily and she hurls it to some forgotten corner in the room. As she shoves the leggings over her thighs, she glances up to see Ben staring at her chest, then the thatch of hair at her privates, then back up to her chest. He follows her off the bed before she’s kicked away the leggings, brackets her sides with his hands, and captures one of her breasts in his mouth. 

Rey’s back bows and she cries out. Heat flashes through her with each flick of his tongue and scrape of his teeth. He’s not doing anything different than he’d done in the dreams, but reality, oh…reality is far better. Not that this should be a surprise, of course. 

She pulls at his shirt in a desperate effort to begin the process of its removal; Ben must think she’s pulling at him instead, for he leaves her chest and returns to her lips, crashing into her with another one of those toe-searing kisses. 

_ Stars, _ she’s forgotten how tall he is. Her neck aches with how far she has to tip her head back to meet him. And his hands— _ oh, _ his hands. They’re large and callused and they’re roaming over every part of her he can reach, cupping her breasts and squeezing her ass and tangling in her hair. 

Rey almost feels guilty for not multitasking as well as he is, since she can barely manage to keep a grip on his shoulders as he tends to her body. 

They’ve been staggering backwards as they kiss. The leggings tangle around Rey’s ankles, and she would care to remove them if Ben hadn’t just slid his hand between her legs, which forces all thoughts from her mind. 

Blunt fingers rub at her most sensitive parts, gliding through arousal-slicked skin. His breath comes hot and quick on her neck. She grabs at his shirt, since it’s  _ still on.  _ There’s something remarkably unfair about their relative states of undress. She’s barely lifted the hem when, with a thud and a gasp, she bumps against the desk, then cries out as one thick finger pushes into her. 

Fingers were fingers, she’d thought. How different could his be than her own? 

Very different, it turns out.

Very, very different. 

Though perhaps it might have been a bit early in this interaction for two fingers, but— Oh, no: with a glance, she sees that he’s using just one. Just one, and it’s so much larger than her own, and tighter, and  _ deeper,  _ and it reaches a spot she’s never been able to touch that sets her legs quivering and her breath fracturing into little gasps. He begins to move it within her, and she hears the sound of her own wetness—one more thing missed in the dreams. 

Ben groans into her neck. Unfinished thoughts flash through his mind and into Rey’s: rapturous praise about how tight she is, how soaked, how perfect. She moans at the low tremble in her belly. It’s never occurred to her such compliments could be this arousing.

He seems to catch himself and pulls back so he can see her face. She loves the way he’s always been able to look at her so hungrily, as if those dark eyes are skating over her features and etching her into his memory. 

“Is this...good?” he asks, breathless. 

“Ye— Yuh—” Her words utterly fail her, so she switches to a rapid nod. A breeze lifts the curtains at the window and cools the sweat beginning to bead on her forehead and neck.  _ Don’t stop, _ she thinks, digging her trembling fingers into his upper arms. 

He doesn’t. A second finger nudges against her labia and inches into her cunt. It goes in to the knuckle when Rey feels the first prickle of pain and she bites off a cry. This is nowhere near the other injuries she’s sustained in her life, yet Ben freezes when he senses the echoes of it. Guilt radiates off him, and Rey tries not to curse when he withdraws his fingers. 

“I’m sorr—” 

His words end in an ‘oof’ as Rey pushes him away so she can wrench his shirt over his head. She takes a solid moment to admire him, letting her hands roam just as he’d done to her earlier. How can he be so soft and so hard at the same time? Touching his wide chest feels as if he’s silk laid over stone. 

Ben is looking at his fingers, and though she’s ravishing his torso with her hands, he seems deep in thought. 

About to ask what’s so distracting, Rey’s question dies as she watches him bring those two fingers, the middle and index, up to his mouth. Her arousal is still coating them, making them shine in the warm light from the lantern, and she can only stare in shock as he holds eye contact while sucking both digits past his lips. 

She manages a single squeak as Ben lifts her easily onto the edge of the desk. He drops to his knees, nudges her legs wide enough for his shoulders to fit between them, and presses a hot, open-mouthed kiss to her cunt. 

Rey’s cry begins as Ben’s name and morphs into a high wail. Oh, it’s so much better like this; last night, she’d been denied the full sensation of the act. Now though, he’s been at it for barely a minute and her head is already spinning. One of her arms buckles and her elbow thuds against the desk. 

“Haven’t— You’ve done this…al— _ ahhn— _ already.” Not that she is opposed, of course, but given the veritable cornucopia of sexual acts, shouldn’t they be focusing on ones that are entirely novel?  __

His response drifts into her mind, since his mouth is occupied.  _ Wasn’t able to taste you before.  _ And then, as if to reinforce this statement, he moves from her clitoris and thrusts his stiffened tongue inside her. 

Sometime soon, she wants him to say those pretty words again out loud. Slurred curses spill from her as pleasure rockets up her spine. One of her legs jerks and begins to tremble, her heel rattling against his shoulder blade. She tries to feel guilty that he’ll undoubtedly be bruised tomorrow, but then he returns his focus to that tight bundle of nerves, and she twines her fingers in his hair without a single care for how hard she must be tugging at it. 

_ Keep doing that forever, _ she sends to him. The exhalation from his chuckle brushes her pubic hair. 

Her orgasm doesn’t so much crest gently over her, as they have done in the past; this one is a crash, an explosion, an unstoppable wave that obliterates every nerve and tears a hoarse scream from her throat. Ben’s mouth keeps working her, and when she seizes against him, he grips her thighs to hold her steady against his continued barrage. 

There’s a ringing in her right ear afterward, and her own breathing sounds like a muffled rasp. 

Ben stands. His mouth shines, as does his chin. He’s covered in  _ her, _ staring at her bared body, touching her as if she’s something to revere. He blinks when Rey struggles upright, and again when she brings her fingers to his mouth and smears her own arousal over his lips, painting him with it, rubbing into his skin. She loves the look of it. She’d once marked him with a saber blade; this is much more temporary, and less painful. 

If it’s a strange thing to do, he doesn’t remark on it, though she can feel the gallop of his heartbeat as if it is her own. 

His erection strains the seams at the front of his pants. Rey tears at the fasteners with fingers that don’t want to cooperate, because he should be naked, and he should be  _ in her, _ and— 

“Wait,” he says through his clenched jaw. 

Rey pauses, panting, her fingers curled into the waistband. “What?” 

Ben’s inhalation is shaky. “I’ve never done…more. Than this. I mean, outside of your mind. Whatever that was.”

She isn’t sure what point he’s trying to make. “So? Neither have I.” 

Even if she couldn’t feel his anxiety, it’s plastered across his face. 

“What are you worried about, Ben?” 

He clenches his jaw again, and his hands tighten on her thighs. “I know you haven’t had…” 

Another pause, and Rey wonders how he can send her thoughts about tasting her privates but can’t bring himself to say the word ‘sex’ out loud. 

He closes his eyes and continues, “Which is why I want it to be good. For you.  _ I _ want to be good. And I don’t know...how.” 

Rey presses a soft kiss to his mouth (she can taste herself, and it does all sorts of tingly things to her stomach). 

“You were doing quite well before,” she says, which makes a flush creep up his chest. “If you’ve been so unpracticed, how’d you manage to figure that out?” 

He mumbles something that sounds similar to ‘holos,’ then says more loudly, “And I listened to your thoughts. What you wanted.” 

Rey leans back on her hands with a smile. “Ah. That’s the trick, then.” She tips her head to the side and tries to channel the roguish attitude he’d donned so well the previous day. “Keep listening.” 

His fingers sweep up the inside of her thigh. “I can do that,” he murmurs. 

“Good. Take off your pants.” 

His lopsided smile puts a crease in one of his cheeks. “You didn’t say anything about following your orders.” He steps between her legs, forcing them wide apart. 

The air is chilly on her heated skin. It should be cooling her off, or at the very least making her more rational, but it only heightens her awareness of the slickness between her thighs. Rey’s never thought about how  _ messy _ sex can be; she’s sweaty, and her hair is a tangled mess around her shoulders, and her cunt is damp both from her own arousal and Ben’s wicked kisses. 

“Following orders is...ahh...listening,” she says as he dips forward and flicks her earlobe with his tongue. 

When he huffs a laugh, it brushes against her neck and  _ gods, _ she wants him inside her so badly she could tear off those damned pants. Though, why shouldn’t she? The Force is easily willed in her state, and she watches with more than a little delight as the threads binding the fabric unravel and the pants slide to the floor, transformed into a pile of scraps. 

“Oh,  _ real _ mature,” Ben growls without malice. 

Rey isn’t paying attention to his sass; she can’t pull her eyes from his cock and the way it juts upright. She’d seen this in the dreams, and though it looks just the same, there’s a drop of something clear welling at the tip. She rubs at it with her thumb, smearing the moisture over the velvety-soft skin, and Ben chokes out a curse.

_ Please. _

It’s a whisper in her mind—or maybe it’s her whisper in his. Not that it matters, much. She pulls him close and reaches between them to position his cock. The head slips a little at her entrance, and then he’s kissing her, sliding his lips over hers while he begins to press inside. 

She wants, she  _ wants… _

Rey sinks her fingernails into his chest and nips his lower lip. She can feel herself parting around this new, startling intrusion, can feel her sex taking him in. It’s like her entire body is electrified; she wouldn’t be surprised if she were to glance down and see sparks setting her skin aglow. 

Ben pushes in another inch and— 

Oh. 

_ There’s _ the pain. It comes as a sharp bite that radiates back to her spine, then settles into a low throb right where he’s intruding. She stiffens and cries out, and Ben freezes. She feels his panic as a sour prickle in her throat.

“I’m sorry, I’m— Fuck—” Ben stammers. He moves to withdraw from her, but she wraps her legs around his waist and clutches his sides.

“Don’t stop. Please, don’t...stop,” she says, and she hates it that sounds like a whimper. Her heels dig into his buttocks and push him deeper, and it hurts, but  _ gods, _ this sort of fullness is so heady and wonderful it could be its own drug. 

“Rey, wait. I’m hurting you. I can’t—” 

She interrupts him, “Then it means it’s...it’s real.” Her legs tighten around him. “Don’t stop. I need… Don’t stop.” 

He goes slowly, and with every additional inch, the ache blooms and spreads through her pelvis. She rides each pulse because, even though she’s been able to smell him and feel him and taste him, this pain means she’s surely not in a dream. She won’t wake up in a few minutes to the glare of the sun on her empty pallet in her empty, lonely room. 

Ben tips his forehead against hers when he’s fully seated, and his unsteady breaths come quick on her chin. There’s a slight tremble in the touch of his hands on her waist. She reaches up and rests her palms on his cheeks, strokes the charming curve of his ears.

The utter intimacy of this act comes upon her with a start. In the stories she’s scrounged, or the shallow holos she’s pilfered, there has never been mention or depiction of the sort of emotional rawness she currently feels. The two of them have been inside each other’s minds and memories—yet here, while they inhale the other’s exhalations, and with the entire length of him settled deep inside her, it’s almost startling to realize they are now as close as two people can physically be. 

Ben’s smile is radiant when her unrestrained thoughts brush against his.

“I feel it too,” he murmurs. 

Rey kisses him until the ache dulls. It happens a little too quickly, and she can’t help but wonder if he’s channeled a fraction of himself into healing. She doesn’t mind, of course, since when he begins to move, she can only feel the hot, heavy press of him inside her. Something entirely new blooms low and hot in her belly, like coals stoked to a bright glow. 

The desk starts to squeak, and at a startling creak that implies imminent failure of one or more joints, Ben lifts her from the desk with one arm at her back and the other braced beneath her rear. She clings to him as he walks them both to the pallet, and he lays her on the mattress. 

There’s a hesitation in the way he settles on top of her, as if he’s uncertain of his own body and fears she’s fragile enough to be crushed beneath him. And, yes, Rey could understand the attitude, because with him hovering over her like this, she’s never in her life felt so small. 

But she’s also never felt so alive, so real. 

A touch at his lower back encourages him to move once more. The rhythm of his thrusts quicken, and her hips tip up to meet his over and over until his grunts and her moans scrabble at the dusty walls. The pallet creaks beneath them both. These are the sounds from the holos, lewd combinations of soaked skin and complaining furniture and throaty cries. The heat inside her burns brighter. 

Ben buries his face in the curve of her neck and whispers her name until the burning coals within her combust and consume them both whole.

-

They sprawl on the pallet afterward. Despite the breeze from outside, the room has become too warm to press against each other, so they’ve settled onto their sides. Ben’s hair is tousled and damp around his temples. His hand rests on her hip, and he strokes her skin with slow sweeps of his thumb. 

Rey makes small, idle circles with her forefinger on his chest. When he lets out a happy sigh at her touch, it’s warm on her cheeks and cools the drying sweat on her neck. 

She had thought sex to be messy before—the true extent of it was a surprise, especially when Ben came to completion. She’ll know now, for the next time. Perhaps have a spare bit of dampened cloth handy. The corner of the threadbare blanket worked well enough for clean-up, even if she’s missed spots, and her skin feels tight on her stomach and the insides of her thighs where his spend has dried. 

She kicks the abused blanket to the floor, then grunts at the twinge in her hamstring. 

“Everything all right?” Ben asks. He must have sensed the twinge. 

Rey gives him a slow, satisfied smile. “Yes. Very much all right.” 

He smiles back, just as slow, just as satisfied. “Glad to hear. I’d feel guilty if you were too sore.” 

She is quite sore, though. Her entire body aches. But such a lovely ache; it’s nothing like the wrung-out exhaustion of a hard day, or the searing tension in her muscles after hours spent in the bowels of derelict ships. When she shifts on the mattress, a drowsy contentment oozes through her fatigued limbs like warm honey. 

Her sigh emerges as a long ‘Mmmm.’ 

“I hadn’t realized doing that would be so lovely,” she says. 

Ben’s eyebrow lifts, and she takes a moment to trace it just to feel the curve of the thick hairs under the pad of her finger. His short laugh brushes against her forearm. 

“How else would it be?” 

Rey shrugs. “I don’t know.” She slides her hand over his skin so her palm rests on his side, against his ribcage, and lets her eyes drift shut. “But it was lovely. I feel…good.” 

She looks at him when he laughs again. This laugh is louder, more jovial. It shakes the pallet and puts wonderful crinkles in his face. 

“What?” She pushes him playfully.

“I was hoping for something a bit more than ‘good,’” he says with a chuckle, and wraps his arm around her so he can pull her close. 

She loves how his lips twitch against hers when she kisses his smile. 

“How about you?” she says. 

“How about me what?”

“Do you feel...good?” She gives his stomach a playful poke and wriggles her finger along his ribs on the last word. 

After a jerk and the barest bit of a yelp, Ben grabs her hand to hold it still. Ticklish, she guesses. An intriguing fact she will most definitely be using to her advantage in the future. 

He folds her arms between them so their hands are joined under Rey’s chin. 

“Also good,” he says. “Relaxed. Happy.” He pauses, then frowns. “Hungry, though.” 

It’s Rey’s turn to laugh. 

-

He eats the womp rat haunch the same way Rey used to consume her food on Jakku, when meals were rare and never filling. This rat hasn’t been sitting in the salt for long enough to completely desiccate it, and Ben’s fingers are covered in grease. In a pause between bites, he wipes the back of his hand across his lips. 

Rey has a few pieces of meat on a metal dish in front of her. They’re seated at the broad table near the food preparation area. Even with all of her cleaning, a fine layer of sand has appeared on the surfaces overnight. She brushes some of it off the corner of the stone table so it can join the sand on the floor. 

The sky is beginning to lighten with the morning, and she can almost hear her body clamoring for nutrients after recent events, yet she can’t bring herself to eat. Not while she worries about exactly how she’d killed the creature Ben’s currently devouring.

“This is perfect,” he says before tearing off a hunk of meat with his teeth. Mouth full, he continues, “‘id you roas’ it? Bake it?” 

Rey shifts on her chair. “Um...roasted it.” 

He swallows noisily. “How did you get it so crispy?” The womp rat skin crunches as he takes another bite. 

She can’t bring herself to look at him when she says, “Uh...Force lightning.” 

Ben chokes. 

His coughing isn’t too wheezy, otherwise she’d offer to hit him on the back a few times, but she feels herself hunching over in shame of the judgment that will undoubtedly spill forth. Once he catches his breath, that is. 

She frowns at his silence. He’s still chewing, though with more hesitation than he’d done before. 

“Tastes...good,” he says. He flicks a glance at her. “Not at all Sith-like.” 

Rey’s frown deepens. “How would Sith-like taste?” 

He swallows and thinks a moment. “Bitter.” 

Her surprised laugh burbles out. “And here I was worried you’d shun me for using it. Cast me away, consider me fallen.” 

A little smile plucks at the corner of his mouth as he licks his fingers. “Definitely, yes to all of those,” he says lightly. 

“It was useful,” she says. “It didn’t  _ feel _ evil.”

“Don’t think evil ever does.” He picks up another piece of haunch only to stare at the charred meat in thought. 

“You should know I’d never do that,” he says, tone suddenly serious. 

“Do what?”

Ben’s eyes meet hers. “Judge you. For your power. For…” He exhales harshly and sets the meat back onto the metal tray on which she’d served him. When he speaks again, his voice is soft. “I know what it’s like to be cast out. Tossed away because of your mistakes. And because of someone else’s fear.” 

Rey tries for levity. “Shooting lightning from my fingertips doesn’t frighten you?” 

“Oh, it terrifies me,” he says, and Rey feels a pang of hurt until she sees the corners of his eyes crinkle. “But it doesn’t define you. It’s something you can do; it isn’t everything you are.” 

Emotion wells up within her, making her throat tight and tears prickle in her eyes. When did he become so wise? She doesn’t know how to express her gratitude and joy at hearing him say such things. He’s accepting her in a way that had never been done for him, that she’s never experienced in her own life: as she is. No modifications, no exclusions. 

Then Ben shrugs. “Besides, that ability has given me a rather satisfying breakfast, so I can’t object to it too much.” He takes another large bite of womp rat, and since he’s nearly done with his portion, Rey slides her own over to him. 

“Are you sure?” he asks, even as he reaches out to grab the hunk of meat and transfer it to his tray. 

“My stomach does better with a milder first meal, I’ve found.” She pulls a root from the bundle she’d gathered a few days ago and nibbles on one end. It’s a bit stale. Some of the fibers stick to the roof of her mouth, and she washes them down with a gulp of  _ Falcon _ water. 

Ben narrows his eyes as he chews, then makes a face and spits over his shoulder. 

“Too much salt?” she says. Perhaps she’s overestimated how much was needed; the air is probably dry enough to dehydrate a womp rat without additional preservatives. 

Ben takes her offered canteen, and after drinking, says, “Too much sand.” He swipes his tongue across his teeth as if to check for remaining grains.

It had been easy to regress into the state of always having sand in her food, so Rey hasn’t noticed whatever extra minerals she’s managed to ingest over the past few days. 

“Why did you decide to come  _ here?”  _ he asks, gesturing to the homestead and, Rey is sure, to the sand. 

She swirls her finger around on the table. Fine grains stick to her skin. “Your mother asked me that,” she says. “Your uncle, too.” 

“What did you say to them?”

Rey scoffs. “Not the truth, that’s certain.” 

“So what is the truth?” He abandons the rest of the meal and settles his elbows on the table, looking at her with curiosity.

“I… I panicked. Everyone was asking me questions I couldn’t bring myself to answer. What was I going to do? How would I carry on a legacy? We’d won, so why did I still seem wretched?” She grinds sand into the table with her thumb. “I needed to get away. Figure out where I was supposed to be, what I was supposed to do. And this was the first place that felt right. Like it had a connection to—” She sighs. “I don’t know. It was a connection to the past. But the more I stay here, the more I realize it’s never been a connection to  _ my  _ past. Maybe it was a mistake to come here at all.” 

He shoots her a wry glance and swipes one of the roots from her bundle. “You figure that out  _ now?” _

She bumps his bare foot with hers and feels the brush of linen on her toes. Hidden by the table like this, she’d forgotten that, because of her lust-driven destruction, he’s had to wrap a folded sheet around his waist so as to not walk around the homestead half-naked. It makes him look a little silly, what with the combination of black tunic and pale, flowing drapery. Not that she’ll tell him.

“Anyway,” she says, “for all of this planet’s faults—”

“Of which there are many.”

“—it’s given me a lot of space to think.”

“As would happen on a planet that’s mostly empty space.” 

_ “Ben.”  _

“Sorry.” 

“What you said last year. I think it might be true.” 

“Probably. What did I say?” 

“Maybe it’s time for the Jedi to end.” 

He chokes on the root and gives her a startled look. She hands him the water once more. 

“Why  _ that?” _ he manages, once his coughing fades. “Why did you decide to focus on something said right after I’d killed the monster who’d warped me into— Or, I suppose, one of the monsters who warped—” He gesticulates as if he’s sweeping the thought away. “It doesn’t matter. I was in a state, and was saying things that—” 

“That were true.” Rey grasps his hand across the table and squeezes, hoping to still his thoughts. It works long enough for her to continue. “The Jedi reject anger. And fear. But that’s what helped me bring you back. It’s…” She purses her lips. “Anger aided me when nothing else could. Fear drove me to do what I’d thought was impossible. Can’t there be a balance? Because...what is joy without the fear or the grief that comes before it? Or...or peace without knowing the bite of fury?”

She releases his hand and sits back on the seat. “That’s what’s been in my mind. Lately.” A bitter laugh bursts from her. “And now that I’ve said it out loud, it all sounds fanatical. Thousands of years of doctrine can’t be undone by a single girl’s whimsy.” 

One of Ben’s eyebrows quirks. It matches the quirk of his lips, and she’s learning to recognize the challenge in that expression. She recognizes the intrigue too, and the delight. 

“Who’s to say they can’t?” 

His confidence is worth grinning at. 

-

They decide to stay at on Tatooine for a few more days. The vaporators manage enough water to refill the  _ Falcon _ ’s tanks before they shudder and squeal into an eternal sort of silence. 

The flowing sheet-skirt won’t get Ben very far on this world, or off of it. He scrounges up a pair of pants from the ship, and although the cuffs are a few inches short and the waistband struggles to stay fastened around his hips, it works well enough to get him to Mos Eisely. 

Rey trades some units of water for spare parts, extra food, and clothes for Ben. The next day, when they have to return to the spaceport for a new hydraulic filter, he wears everything she’s bought: a pale linen shirt (it fits snugly over his shoulders and has a short ‘v’ in the front which lets her easily press a kiss to the top part of his chest), a pair of dark trousers (they’re more fitted than his former pants, and she enjoys walking behind him in order to freely ogle), and a dusky brown jacket (it reminds her of Poe’s, though this one looks far better on Ben).

The low-slung blaster he buckles at his side she didn’t buy. Ben found it beneath a mound of old, tangled wiring while searching through creaking drawers and squealing cabinets for pants. He had simply stared at it for a long minute, and Rey wondered if he would even pick it up, yet he’d pulled it out of the mess, checked it over, and with a deep breath, had fastened the straps around his waist and thigh.

Rey leans against a domicile wall and watches him across the square as he barters with a mechanic. The blaster seems to fit him. Just like the jacket does, and his new trousers. His attitude, as well. She sees it in the way he gestures at the mechanic with an demeanor that is so genuine in its unabashed frustration. He’s no longer trying to suppress his emotions, or tamp down the honest bits of himself. 

The mechanic must be making the trade difficult; Ben aims his forefinger between two of the creature’s three narrowed eyes before pointing it at another part seller’s stand across the square. The creature waves some of its arms around in alarm, then dives into one of its overflowing baskets. 

Ben looks over his shoulder at Rey and jerks his head as if to say, ‘See? I’ve got this.’

She has to agree. 

When he settles his hands on his hips, she finds herself staring at the long lines of his body. A little thrill courses through her as her thoughts begin to travel.

While their days have been filled with maintenance and preparation for leaving, the same cannot be said for the nights. 

She’s discovered quite a bit. She’s learned what makes him shiver, what things she can do with her mouth that make him shout in pleasure. She knows she likes it when he bends her over the desk in the bedroom, grasping her hair tight in his fist, whispering filthy things that weaken her legs and are barely audible over the rhythmic slap of their bodies. And she loves when she can see the look of rapt adoration on his face when she sits astride him, his hands gentle and constantly roaming. 

Yet there’s still much more to discover.

Ben half turns, his brow furrowed as if he’s trying to hear something far away. Then he must sense the shape of her thoughts, the heat of them. His gaze catches hers and she sees her own lust reflected on his face. The traders and citizens fall away, as does the square, and the bright sunlight, and the sand swirling about in gentle currents, until he is the only presence she can feel in the universe. 

The mechanic nudges Ben’s shoulder with the sack of items. Ben starts, which breaks them both out of their reverie. He takes the bundled assortment and blurts things she can’t hear to the mechanic as a bright flush creeps up his neck. 

And later, after they’ve prepared the ship for tomorrow’s departure, they make new discoveries again, and again, and again.

-

_ Aren’t we supposed to be leaving? _

“We are.”

_ But all the systems are ready to go. And the supplies are packed. And we’ve been sitting here for an hour. The suns are almost down. _

“We’ll leave. Don’t worry. He just… He needs some time.” 

_ Why? _

Rey glances down the hallway to the cockpit. Ben sits in the pilot’s chair. He’s hunched over, his elbows digging into his knees, and his black hair falls around his face, obscuring his expression from her, but his grief is an acrid tang on her tongue. 

“He doesn’t like this ship very much.” She crouches to brush a clod of dirt off one of BB-8’s sensors. “It reminds him of…” How much would a droid understand of loss like this? She tries once more. “He’s spent so much time avoiding the past. It helps, sometimes, to not think about things that hurt. But this ship  _ is _ the past. For him.” 

_ Oh.  _ The droid’s head swivels to the cockpit, then back to Rey.  _ Shall I tell him a joke? _

Rey lets out a small laugh. “That’s very kind of you. I think he might like that, later. Let’s wait until we’re airborne first.” 

She stands and makes her way to the cockpit. Her loose hair brushes her shoulders, and she pulls it up into a quick knot at the nape of her neck. The buns always managed to keep her hair out of her face, yet they seem more like a relic now, and far too time-intensive for what little purpose they ever served. 

Ben lifts his head as she sits in the co-pilot’s chair. His eyes are red-rimmed, and when he sees her, he wipes the back of his hand across his cheek and clears his throat. 

“We’ve talked about leaving for days without saying where we’re going to go.” 

There’s an edge to his voice. If he’s going to talk about what feelings have been bombarding him for the past hour, it won’t be now. 

Rey rests her hand on his forearm. She’ll be here to listen, whenever he decides to do so.

Some of her intent must have gotten through to him; his posture relaxes, and he shoots her a look that is part relief, part gratitude. 

“We could find a planet with kyber crystals,” she says. “Then you can make a new lightsaber.” He had been thrilled to see hers, and had sat rapt as she told the story of its creation. 

Ben frowns out the front windows. “I don’t know if I should wield a saber again.” 

“Why not?”

“The old one destroyed so much.” He glances around the cockpit before his gaze settles on the dice hanging from a hook. His hands flex on the armrests. “I can never rid myself of that.” 

“Then don’t. Use it to guide the path of your new one.” 

When he laughs, it’s more of a snort. He turns a skeptical look on her with his eyebrows high. “I’m not sure how the Jedi can end if you keep speaking exactly like them.”

Rey scoffs at her lap. “That sounded awfully grandiose, I suppose.”

“I thought it was nice.”

She settles into the chair with a satisfied smile. “All right, then. We’ll put a pin in that journey. Where do you  _ want _ to go?” Reconnecting with the former Resistance is inevitable; Rey misses her friends, and Poe will eventually want his droid back. The story of Ben Solo is one meant to be shared—when he’s ready, of course. Until then, she can use the time to perfect the telling of it.

Ben reaches out to the switch that will start the engines. He pauses, fingers inches from the console, as if he’s hesitant to get fingerprints over gleaming controls someone will scold him for later. Then he clenches his jaw and flips the switch. 

The  _ Falcon _ rumbles beneath them, and over the low whine, Rey can just make out BB-8’s relieved whistle. 

“So?” Rey presses, since Ben never actually answered her. “Where are we headed?”

He’s thoughtful for a moment. “There’s a lot of wonder out there. A lot of mystery. Chaos.” He gives her a lopsided smile that’s lit by excitement. “Should we try and find some?”

The  _ Falcon _ lifts off the sandy bluff, higher and higher. Down by the homestead, the twin suns would have been sinking beyond the horizon and settling the landscape into night. In the ship though, as they ascend through clouds and atmosphere and up into the inky darkness of space, the suns gleam bright and steady, two partnered stars that will never set.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The title for this fic is inspired by the poem [i carry your heart with me (i carry it in)](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/49493/i-carry-your-heart-with-mei-carry-it-in) by e.e. cummings. Not only is it a lovely and romantic bit of prose, it was also a pretty strong inspiration for this story. (‘Cause I’m a romantic dorky dweeb.)
> 
> Also if you like my writing, I'm doing some original stuff, coming out in the next while! I'm on the bird app @alexalanwrites <3


End file.
